The Unidata Program Center is hiring! We are looking for a scientific software developer to join our team as a technical lead in creating and maintaining software and data services to support the geosciences.
We are looking for a lead software developer to help us help our community of scientists access the Earth system science data that fuels their research. You'll collaborate with other Unidata developers to test, support, maintain, and develop Unidata software products and real-time data streams. You will work closely with end-users and other Unidata developers to identify community needs for software and data, and participate in Unidata's efforts to meet those needs. This position will focus on development of and support for the AWIPS package.
The Unidata Program Center's three summer student interns — Jessica Blunt from the University of Oklahoma, Max Grover from the University of Illinois, and Aodhan Sweeney from the University of Washington — have come to the end of their summer appointments. After a summer of dedicated work they presented the results of their projects to the UPC staff on July 31, 2019. You can find videos of their presentations to the UPC staff on the Unidata Seminar Series page.
This summer at Unidata I worked on expanding functionality for both the netCDF C++ library and the Python data access tool Siphon. Previously, the netCDF C++ library was lacking important functionality that was included in other netCDF libraries. Fortunately, adding this functionality is a straightforward process. I created function wrappers in the C++ library that would call previously made functions in the C library. This allows those working in a C++ framework to continue to use the netCDF libraries without sacrificing additional functionality.
The primary task that I completed this summer was adding METAR functionality to MetPy. METAR stands for METeorological Aerodrome Report. METARs contain information about surface data including temperature, dew point, wind speed and direction, and several other meteorological variables. Prior to this summer, MetPy did not have the ability to parse METARs. Also, the current parser that is used to generate netCDF files on the Unidata THREDDS server had a substantial amount of missing data. By adding METAR parsing tools, we made additional surface data available to the user, making it easier to make high quality surface maps using MetPy.
The overarching theme of my projects this summer has been improving the accessibility of the Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) for the average scientist. The IDV is a versatile and powerful, though complicated, program.
When I ask people if they've heard of the IDV, there are two types of answers that stand out. The first, a simple “no” or “I think someone mentioned it once.” The second, something like “I've tried to figure it out, but didn't get very far.” I worked to reach those who gave the second answer.
The National Science Foundation is sponsoring a workshop focusing on “Next Generation Cloud Research Infrastructure,” on November 11-12, 2019, in Princeton, NJ. The workshop will immediately precede the ACM HotNets 2019 workshop at the same location.
