Faculty members in the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) Oceanography Department are embarking upon a new voyage: to learn Python. The USNA Oceanography Department has traditionally used Matlab as the primary tool to analyze and visualize geosciences data. To build on that coding success and align with the efforts of the geosciences community, at the start of the spring 2020 semester, Associate Professor Bradford Barrett and Instructor Alexander Davies organized a “Python Book Club” in which faculty members meet once or twice a month to collaboratively learn Python. Because USNA is a small undergraduate-only institution with resource limitations and complex federal networking restrictions, Barrett (USNA's UCAR Representative) and Davies (currently serving on the Unidata Users Committee) reached out to Unidata for help.
The Unidata Users Committee is organizing a series of regional workshops designed to follow the 2018 Unidata Users Workshop Reducing Time to Science: Evolving Workflows for Geoscience Research and Education. These follow-on workshops will explore tools to access data and strategies for teaching computational concepts. Each one-day workshop will bring together geoscience educators, pedagogical experts, and Unidata staff to discuss and share best practices for helping students engage in data-enabled science.
As a community-governed program, Unidata depends on guidance and feedback from educators, researchers, and students in the atmospheric and related sciences. The 2020 Unidata Community Survey seeks your feedback the range of data analysis and visualization software packages maintained and supported by Unidata staff. Your comments and ideas will help Unidata's governing committees and staff plan our future development activities more effectively; your participation is much appreciated.
The Survey will close at midnight on 19 February 2020. If you haven't done so yet, please give Unidata your thoughts on our data analysis and visualization packages.
In case you missed it — here's a recap of news from the Unidata Program Center for the month of January, 2020.
Unidata wants to hear from you! Unidata is in the middle of conducting a community survey to guide our future development efforts for our analysis and visualization software packages. We really need your feedback to understand where we should put our resources so we can best meet your needs. The survey is quite short — it should take roughly five minutes to complete — and will help us understand how we can best support the Unidata community going forward. If you haven't already, please take a few minutes to complete the Unidata 2020 Community Survey. We appreciate your help!
This year's annual American Meteorological Society meeting was held 12-16 January 2020 in Boston, Massachusetts. Unidata Program Center staff were happy to be able to attend as presenters of talks and posters, conveners of sessions, and facilitators of workshops and short courses for students, educators, and researchers. Staff members also spent time meeting community members in the new exhibit hall booth bringing together a variety of UCAR and NCAR programs in one space. As always, we were also glad to meet so many prospective community members at the AMS Student Conference.
With so much going on at the conference, we can't cover everything here. Instead, we present some highlights as recalled by UPC staff members who attended.
NOAA is searching for a Physical Scientist to work at the National Weather Service (NWS), National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), Environmental Modeling Center (EMC), in College Park, MD.
