The Big Data Project (BDP) is an initiative undertaken by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to increase public availability of large volumes of environmental data collected and generated by the agency. As part of the Big Data Project, Unidata is working in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) on a demonstration project to provide access to a more than twenty years of archived NEXRAD Level II radar data — augmented continuously with new, real-time data — stored in Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) environment. In addition to assisting AWS with ingesting new data flowing from the NEXRAD sites, Unidata Program Center staff have set up a THREDDS Data Server in the AWS environment to provide services allowing community access to the stored data.

An AMS Short Course on Open Source Radar Software will be held on the 13th of September 2015 in Norman, Oklahoma preceding the 37th Conference on Radar Meteorology. Preliminary programs, registration, hotel, and general information on the conference are available on the AMS conference web site.

Editor's note: Shawn Cheeks was a Unidata Summer Intern in 2013 and again in 2014. He is a senior at Marshall University in Huntington, WV, majoring in computer science and applied math with a minor in meteorology. He plans to continue on to graduate school to eventually earn a PhD in atmospheric science.

During my internship last year with Unidata, I developed an Android version of a netCDF Subset Service form. Coming back this year, I wanted to expand my endeavors in mobile development by writing an application that works on all mobile platforms. To do this, I decided to use Apache Cordova because it takes a JavaScript/HTML file and packages it as a native application for any mobile platform. The product of choice this year was Unidata's radar data as it seemed to be a product well suited for mobile users.