Members of the Unidata Program Center staff will be attending the American Geophysical Union 2013 Fall meeting, December 9-13 2013, in San Francisco. The schedule below lists specific sessions at which UPC staff will be in attendance. See the AGU Fall meeting Scientific Program for additional information on the sessions.
Three new IDV tutorials created by Dr. Brian Mapes of the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (RSMAS) are available on Unidata's YouTube channel. The new tutorials introduce the Mapes IDV Collection, which is a curated compilation of IDV bundles and "templates" delivered in the form of an IDV plugin. Dr. Mapes is building the Collection to bring together and provide easy access to some interesting datasets and displays that he uses in his own research and teaching.
We encourage those interested in learning more about the IDV to watch and send comments and feedback to the Unidata IDV development team or to Dr. Mapes. We are open to suggestions for future screencast topics, and encourage you to send in topic requests.
The RAMADDA development team is pleased to announce the release of RAMADDA 1.5. The Repository for Archiving, Managing and Accessing Diverse Data (RAMADDA) is an Open Source information management and data repository framework for the geosciences that provides a turnkey system enabling data providers and users to upload, manage, and share data holdings.
Version 4.3.8 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.
Unidata's Policy Committee — one of the program's two governing committees — has chosen to change its name. After a vote at the October 2013 committee meeting, committee members voted to change the name to the Unidata Strategic Advisory Committee.
Although piracy has been around since nations have engaged in maritime trade, the scale and focus of attacks in and around the Horn of Africa has attracted significant attention over the past few years. The publicity reached a peak in April 2009 following the seizure of the Maersk Alabama and the direct involvement of the US Navy in the release of the ship's Captain. The extent of piracy in the Gulf of Aden and waters adjacent to Somalia led to the formation of Combined Task Force 151 (CTF151) to conduct anti-piracy operations.
As part of their task force activities, the Royal Australian Navy's Hydrography and METOC branch began to analyze whether any weather-dependent patterns could be identified in the timing and distribution of piracy attacks. The study commenced with accessing the NGA piracy database and overlaying the location of each attack on the long-term climate average for monthly mean significant wave height (a measure of the combined height of the locally wind driven sea and the underlying long wave swell).
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 School of Meteorology of the College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences at the University of Oklahoma seeks a Coordinator of Departmental Computing Systems and Services.
The 94th AMS Annual Meeting will be held 2–6 February 2014 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia. As in previous years, the Society will sponsor a Career Fair at the beginning of the meeting.