The Python-focused Unidata Regional Software Training Workshop scheduled for April 22-23, 2020 at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks has been postponed due to UCAR COVID-19 travel restrictions.

A new date for the workshop will be determined in the near future. Please stay tuned.

The University of Alaska, Fairbanks will be hosting a Unidata Regional Software Training Workshop April 22-23, 2020. Unidata software developers will be leading the two-day Python-focused workshop, which will cover the use of the MetPy and Siphon packages in the context of atmospheric science. A basic familiarity with Python is assumed — check out the Unidata Online Python Training for a refresher.

Unidata holds regional workshops in part to facilitate easy access to software training for those who may not be able to travel to training workshops held at the Unidata Program Center in Boulder, Colorado. Attendance is explicitly not limited to local students and staff; we encourage those within the state of Alaska to consider attending. Financial support is available for those that must travel from outside Fairbanks.

Faculty members in the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) Oceanography Department are embarking upon a new voyage: to learn Python. The USNA Oceanography Department has traditionally used Matlab as the primary tool to analyze and visualize geosciences data. To build on that coding success and align with the efforts of the geosciences community, at the start of the spring 2020 semester, Associate Professor Bradford Barrett and Instructor Alexander Davies organized a “Python Book Club” in which faculty members meet once or twice a month to collaboratively learn Python. Because USNA is a small undergraduate-only institution with resource limitations and complex federal networking restrictions, Barrett (USNA's UCAR Representative) and Davies (currently serving on the Unidata Users Committee) reached out to Unidata for help.

MetPy 0.12.0 has been released with several features and fixes, including METAR decoding and mixed-layer CAPE calculation. This is the first release that only supports Python 3.

The Unidata Program Center is hiring! We are looking for a Python developer to join our team in creating and maintaining software and data services to support the geosciences.

We are looking for a Python developer to help us help our community of scientists access the Earth system science data that fuels their research. As a member of the Python team, you will collaborate with other Unidata developers to test, support, maintain, and develop Unidata open source software products and real-time data streams.