The Unidata Program receives the majority of its funding from the National Science Foundation. Every five years, the program submits a new proposal to the NSF, outlining past accomplishments and describing plans for future activities. We recently received word from the NSF that Unidata's most recent five-year proposal had been accepted and funded.
While much of the work proposed involves the continuation and extension of existing programs, projects, and services, the proposal does chart a new direction for the program; namely the provision of data and services through the "cloud" mechanisms that are becoming ubiquitous.
Cameron Beccario's "earth" web application displays GFS model output from NCEP (click to expand)
meeting of the Unidata Users and Policy Committees, Fall 2012
If you have a few minutes to spend looking at some nice graphics, browse on over to earth.
earth is a browser-based visualization of global weather conditions created by Cameron Beccario. Beccario says that "earth is a personal project I've used to learn javascript and browser programming, and is based on the earlier Tokyo Wind Map project."
The Unidata Program Center has an opening for a community services manager. The main focus of this position will be establishing, cultivating, and maintaining relationships with organizations with which collaboration is important in advancing Unidata's mission of serving the broad Unidata community, which includes UCAR, universities, consortia, government, and the private sector.
Unidata is hosting a Short Course on Integrating WRF and Other Model Output with Remote and In-situ Observational Datasets using Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) on 2nd February 2013, preceding the 94th AMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. Preliminary programs, registration, hotel, and general information are posted on the AMS Annual Meeting Web site https://annual.ametsoc.org/2014/
The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) in Boulder, Colorado is offering visitor appointments for up to a year, beginning on a mutually agreed upon start date. Proposals must be received by January 6, 2014, with notification to submitters of successful proposals in early March 2014.
Version 4.3.9 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 NetCDF-Java/Common Data Model (CDM) library and THREDDS Data Server (TDS) version 4.3.20 were released on November 26, 2013. The development team recommends this upgrade for anyone using the CDM or TDS.
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.
