Version 4.4.9 of the netCDF Operators (NCO) has been released. NCO is an Open Source package that consists of a dozen standalone, command-line programs that take netCDF files as input, then operate (e.g., derive new data, average, print, hyperslab, manipulate metadata) and output the results to screen or files in text, binary, or netCDF formats.

The NCO project is coordinated by Professor Charlie Zender of the Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine. More information about the project, along with binary and source downloads, are available on the SourceForge project page.

Unidata is happy to announce the Community Equipment Award recipients for 2015. Five institutions received funding this year:

• Plymouth State University
• University of California, San Diego
• University of Nebraska, Lincoln
• University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
• Western Kentucky University

The High Impact Weather Prediction Project (HIWPP) team has announced that output from the experimental, high-resolution NAVGEM model has been added to the HIWPP Open Data Initiative Real-time Data service.

The Geographic Information Systems program at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) seeks to foster sharing of knowledge about the Earth system using GIS tools. The program encompasses a number of projects aimed at integrating natural and social sciences data in GIS, improving spatial the accuracy and usability of weather and climate models, and building capacity in the atmospheric science community.

Unidata Users and Strategic Advisory Committees

Unidata is governed by its community. Our governing committees facilitate consensus-building for future directions of the Unidata Program and establish standards of involvement for the community.

The Unidata Program Center is seeking new people to serve on Unidata's Strategic Advisory and Users Committees. This is your chance to make a difference on behalf of the Unidata community. As William Gallus, the current Chair of the Unidata Strategic Advisory Committee notes, "Serving as a member of these committees puts you in the driver's seat to help shape the future of Unidata and thus the future of real time weather data delivery and the means to work with it."

Workshop participants

During the weekend of April 10-12 2015, the University of South Florida (USF) was host to a Unidata Regional Workshop on the use of Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV), the open source Repository for Archiving, Managing, and Accessing Diverse Data (RAMADDA), and the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS II). The workshop was organized by Dr. Jennifer Collins, with assistance from her students Randall Hergert, Heather Key and Leilani Paxton, in collaboration with Unidata Program Center staff members Tom Yoksas, Yuan Ho, and Michael James. The workshop was sponsored by USF, Florida Institute of Technology (FIT) and the West Central Florida Chapter of the American Meteorological Society.

Registration is now open for Unidata's 2015 Software Training Workshop. The workshop features Unidata's display and analysis packages IDV and AWIPS-II (with GEMPAK), as well as data access and management tools including the Local Data Manager (LDM) and the THREDDS Data Server (TDS). This year's workshop will also include a session on using the Python programming language with Unidata technologies.

The workshop will be held July 20 – August 5, 2015. Individual courses last from one to three days.

Students at Colorado State University

The Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University (CSU) has a long history of research and education in all aspects of the atmospheric sciences. Faculty, students, and staff use a wide variety of datasets in their research and teaching, from numerical models to gridded reanalyses to radar and satellite observations to measurements collected in the field and lab. However, the students in the department recognized issues that were preventing these large datasets from being used to their full potential.

With a grant from the Unidata Community Equipment Awards program, along with a grant from the College of Engineering, the CSU Department of Atmospheric Science acquired a data storage server that makes many of these data sources readily and easily accessible to students.