In the spring of 2019, Northern Illinois University (NIU) applied for and received a Unidata Community Equipment Award grant for a project titled “Bringing back weather.niu.edu: A multifaced server at Northern Illinois University.” The NIU Meteorology department (now Geographic and Atmospheric Sciences) has been involved in the dissemination of meteorological data since the late 1990s, when Russell L. DeSouza Award winner Mr. Gilbert Sebenste set up the “NIU Weather” server at weather.niu.edu. The server relayed data to dozens of Universities via the LDM and had a popular “storm machine” website that provided some of the earliest model forecast soundings. After Mr. Sebenste's departure from NIU in 2017, the server was taken off-line.
