Jon Thielen

Jonathan Thielen joined the Unidata Program Center as a software development summer intern on May 21, 2018. Jonathan will be a senior this fall at Iowa State University, majoring in meteorology and mathematics. His current research revolves around WRF sensitivity studies, focusing on convective morphology of mesoscale convective systems. This summer, Jon will be working on further integrating xarray into MetPy and implementing cross section functionality.

Hailey Johnson

Hailey Johnson joined the Unidata Program Center as a software development summer intern on May 21, 2018. Hailey is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Geological Sciences with a minor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida. Her dissertation research focuses on numerical methods and applications in coastal sciences, concentrating on improvements to numerical modeling of coastline evolution. Her main goal during her internship will be improving the THREDDS Data Server user experience, primarily through a redesign of the TDS web interface.

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. Direct involvement in the Program by the academic community helps Unidata stay on top of trends in education and research; for example, recent initiatives on Python and cloud-based computing have benefitted tremendously from committee advice and involvement.

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 Sepideh Yalda, the current Chair of the Unidata Strategic Advisory Committee notes, “Unidata has and continues to serve a critical role in providing data and services to the earth and related sciences community. The opportunity to serve as a member on Unidata governance committees provides you with the ability to contribute and help guide the future developments in data sharing and the associated services in support of research and education in atmospheric sciences.”

MetPy 0.8.0 has been released. This release has a wide collection of new features as well as minor bug fixes, including several contributions from our community. For full release notes see the GitHub Release Page.

Registration will be opening shortly for Unidata's 2018 Software Training Workshop. The workshop features courses on Unidata's display and analysis packages MetPy, IDV, and AWIPS, as well as courses on data access and management tools including the Local Data Manager (LDM) and the THREDDS Data Server (TDS), and netCDF.