The Unidata Program Center is pleased to welcome new members to the program's governing committees. Committee members normally serve three-year terms; terms are finishing up for two members of the Users committee and three members of the Policy committee. We'll also be welcoming a new Graduate Student representative and a new representative from NASA. New members and those finishing their terms will overlap for one meeting, which will take place in October 2013.
The UPC staff looks forward to working with our new committee members, and to having all the current members of both committees at the Program Center in Boulder, Colorado for the October meetings.
Between September 12-15, 2013, Colorado's front range experienced a weather event that caused some of the worst flooding in the region's history. More than 17 inches of rain fell in Boulder over the course of the storm; the average annual precipitation in the city is roughly 20 inches.
Communities along the front range, in the mountains to the west, and on the plains to the east are busy responding to the event. Numerous mountain roads were washed away by the floodwaters, leaving residents stranded; airlift operations are still underway to bring people to safety. Twelve helicopters from the National Guard and Red Cross are using Boulder's Municipal Airport (located very near the Unidata Program Center office) as a base for the largest aerial rescue effort in the U.S. since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Millersville University is pleased to sponsor and host a Unidata Regional Workshop on October 21-22, 2013. The purpose of this workshop is to provide introductory and advanced training in the use of Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV). The workshop will also include a presentation and hands-on session showcasing the GEOScience Probe of Discovery (GEOPOD), a National Science Foundation funded project that leverages Unidata's IDV to create an interactive 3-D learning environment where students can navigate a virtual probe through real geophysical data and actuate devices to explore and discover the atmosphere
The Unidata Program Center is hiring! We are looking for a system administrator to join our team in creating and maintaining software and data services to support the geosciences.
The Unidata Program Center has openings for two software engineers. The main focus of these positions will be in the THREDDS group working on the netCDF-Java and the THREDDS Data Server (TDS) software. We are looking for self-motivated people who thrive in a flexible job with great benefits, building world-class web services for scientific data.
Library software like netCDF or HDF5 provides access to multidimensional data by array indices, but we would often rather access data by coordinates, such as points on the Earth's surface or space-time bounding boxes. This blog, with an accompanying iPython notebook, explores some issues with correctness and efficiency in accessing data by coordinates instead of array indices in a real-world example.
The Unidata Program Center is pleased to welcome Sheri Ruscetta to our staff. Sheri joined us as an administrative assistant on June 17th, 2013; in addition to other administrative duties, she'll be serving as our Workshop Coordinator.
Since late May 2013, the Unidata Program Center has been fortunate to play host to this year's Summer Intern, Shawn Cheeks, who is entering his Junior year at Marshall University in West Virginia this fall. He has worked on a number of software projects, including one developing an Android app for reporting severe weather events. Shawn has also worked with folks at the Charleston WFO on some testing, so he's no newcomer to working with weather data.
