The Unidata Users Committee is seeking nominations for a Graduate Student representative to join the group of nine university faculty members currently serving on this committee. Nominees should be Graduate Students who have completed at least one year of study, use Unidata software, and hold a strong interest in the Unidata program. Nominations may be made by any community member, and self-nominations are acceptable. This position will be for a two-year term.
In addition to bringing a valuable student perspective to Unidata committee discussions, Graduate Student representatives make numerous professional contacts at Unidata and in the university community at large, and gain insights stemming from participation in Unidata program governance. The Unidata Users committee meets twice a year in Boulder, CO; the Unidata Program Center pays all travel and lodging expenses for the student representative's travel to committee meetings.
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.”
Registration is 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.
Unidata's web site has a new look. If you're reading this on the web site, you've undoubtedly figured that out. If you're reading News@Unidata via an RSS feed or some other aggregator, however, it's possible you haven't seen the site's redesign. Check it out.
Unidata's web site was last redesigned in 2011. In recent months, all of the individual organizations that make up the University Corporation for Atmosphetic Research (UCAR) have been working to adopt a common web design theme; the Unidata site's new visual style is our interpretation of the common look and feel. You'll find other interpretations at the sites for NCAR, different programs within the UCAR Community Programs (UCP), (like COMET and GLOBE and the Visiting Scientist Programs (VSP) to name just a few), and of course at UCAR's top-level web site.
Version 4.5.0 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.
The NetCDF-Java/Common Data Model (CDM) library and THREDDS Data Server (TDS) version 4.6.2 were released on June 9th, 2015. The development team recommends this upgrade for anyone using the CDM or TDS. The latest update can be downloaded from:
The Unidata Program Center is happy to be hosting summer intern Josh Clark. Josh graduated from the University of Northern Colorado (UNC) in the spring of 2015 with a B.S. in Meteorology, and is headed to the graduate program at San Jose State's Fire Weather Research Lab this fall.
The Unidata Summer Internships offer undergraduate and graduate students an opportunity to work with Unidata software engineers and scientists on projects drawn from a wide variety of areas in the atmospheric and computational sciences.
MetPy is an Open Source project aimed at providing a Pythonic library for meteorological data analysis that meshes well with the rest of the scientific Python ecosystem. The project heavily leverages the work already done by the Numpy, Scipy, and Matplotlib projects, and adds on top functionality specific to meteorology: plotting (e.g. Skew-Ts), calculations, and reading files (e.g. WSR-88D NIDS files).
THREDDS development is now switching to version 5.0 which will require Java 8. Version 5 is a major upgrade and some of the APIs will change. Deprecated classes will be moved to a legacy jar and will not be supported. If you are a developer, you will need to test the new version against your code. We expect to have an alpha release out by July for that purpose.
