AMS 2026 Conference Highlights from the NSF Unidata Staff
This year's annual American Meteorological Society meeting was held 25-29 January 2026 in Houston, TX. Several NSF Unidata staff members were able to travel to Houston to visit with students, present papers and posters, and otherwise take part in the conference. As always, staff members spent some time meeting with community members at UCAR's exhibit hall booth. The following are some of the conference highlights from the perspective of NSF Unidata staff.
25th Student Conference
At this year's AMS Annual Meeting, NSF Unidata shared a table with UCAR Community Program CPAESS at the Student Conference Career Fair, held Saturday and Sunday evenings before the main conference exhibition hall opened. Our table attracted many visitors, with students interested in data and software available from NSF Unidata as well as our Summer Internship program.
In addition to talking with students at the Career Fair, NSF Unidata staff members Drew Camron and Tiffany Meyer also helped out at the Student Conference, presenting a breakout session titled Hands-on Experiences - Exploring Meteorological Datasets with NSF Unidata AWIPS and MetPy. Around 60 students attended the session, and many of them chose to interact with the workshop materials by connecting to the NSF Unidata Science Gateway and using the Jupyter notebooks provided by the presenters.
And speaking of students our summer 2025 student interns were at AMS this year: both Linfeng Li (C++ Accelerating Unidata’s MetPy Thermodynamic Engine and its Adaptation to Jovian Storm Analysis) and Jaye Norman (Performance Benchmarking of NSF Unidata MetPy in a CI/CD Workflow) presented their 2025 summer work during both the Student Conference and the 42nd Conference on Environmental Information Processing Technologies (EIPT) poster session.
NSF Unidata Software Tools at the Conference
This year, NSF Unidata software developer Tiffany Meyer presented the NSF Unidata AWIPS Update, detailing the Program Center's continuing efforts to modify and redistribute the National Weather Service's Advanced Weather Information Processing System (AWIPS) package for use outside of NWS forecasting operations, with a focus on meeting the needs of the University community.
The NSF Unidata MetPy team was also on hand, with MetPy developer and NSF Unidata deputy director Ryan May giving a talk titled Improving MetPy Performance with C++: Gains and Challenges NSF Unidata MetPy developer Drew Camron was also on hand, along with numerous community contributors to the MetPy package.
The NSF Unidata Science Gateway made an appearance during the talks as well, with developer Julien Chastang describing work he and developer Ana Espinoza have done at the Program Center. Julien's talk, titled Unidata Science Gateway: Integrating A Atmospheric Science Desktop Applications with Modern Code-Driven Workflows in the Cloud highlighted work done to allow Science Gateway users to work with traditional desktop applications like AWIPS and IDV in from within a web browser.
Visiting with Community
The Program Center's Community Services Manager, Tanya Vance, spent some time updating the community on the results of NSF Unidata's 2025 Community Survey. Her talk, titled Voices of the Earth Systems Science Community: Insights from the 2025 NSF Unidata Assessment Survey, highlighted some of the key findings from the survey, including information about how community members are using NSF Unidata software and data, as well as what they would like to see from the Program Center in the future.
In addition to interacting with community members at talks and poster sessions, NSF Unidata staff members spent time at the UCAR/NCAR booth in the AMS exhibit hall. Over the course of two sessions at the booth, we were able to connect with more than 75 community members, including students, faculty, and staff about internships, software, and data access.
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