Tiffany Meyer joined the Unidata Program Center software development team on May 18th, 2020. Before joining Unidata, Tiffany had been at the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies (CIMMS) — a collaborative research facility sponsored by the University of Oklahoma — for the past 8 years. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in Meteorology from the University of Oklahoma, and a Master of Science degree in Atmospheric Science with a focus on lightning from Colorado State University.
Despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the Unidata Program Center is working with three software development interns via a “virtual internship” program this summer. Even though we're not in the office, we're happy to have these three students with us for the summer of 2020. Click through to read their introductions.
In the spring of 2019, Northern Illinois University (NIU) applied for and received a Unidata Community Equipment Award grant for a project titled “Bringing back weather.niu.edu: A multifaced server at Northern Illinois University.” The NIU Meteorology department (now Geographic and Atmospheric Sciences) has been involved in the dissemination of meteorological data since the late 1990s, when Russell L. DeSouza Award winner Mr. Gilbert Sebenste set up the “NIU Weather” server at weather.niu.edu. The server relayed data to dozens of Universities via the LDM and had a popular “storm machine” website that provided some of the earliest model forecast soundings. After Mr. Sebenste's departure from NIU in 2017, the server was taken off-line.
The Unidata Program Center is hiring! We are looking for a scientific software developer to join our team in creating and maintaining software and data services to support the geosciences.
Drew Camron joined the Unidata Program Center software development team on February 18th, 2020. Drew majored in Meteorology and Physics with a minor in Mathematics at Mississippi State University before coming to the University of Colorado for graduate studies in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science. He received his Master's degree in 2019.
Drew's graduate work included modeling atmospheric gravity waves before shifting to study modeled and observed satellite measurements of climate-scale precipitation patterns over the Greenland Ice Sheet. But his scientific work showed him a parallel path. “My time in school taught me that my motivation and excitement came from developing tools (especially software) that can help teach or enable other people to do exciting science,” he says.
Unidata is governed by its community. Our governing committees facilitate consensus-building for future directions of the Unidata Program and establish standards of involvement for the community. Direct involvement in the Program by the academic community helps Unidata stay on top of trends in education and research; for example, recent initiatives on Python and cloud-based computing have benefitted tremendously from committee advice and involvement.
The Unidata Program Center is seeking new people to serve on Unidata's Strategic Advisory and Users Committees. We are looking for creative people at U.S. universities and colleges who are using Unidata products and services — or who are familiar with Unidata — to help guide the program in addressing the needs of our broadening community. We need the insights of active educators and researchers to spot new opportunities and take advantage of the expanding range of scientific data. We're looking for help identifying new tools and services — along with improvements to our existing offerings — that will advance the scientific and educational goals of the community. This is a chance for you to make a difference on behalf of the Unidata community.
The Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) version 5.7 is now available. This release features enhanced color tables, support for NWS Hazard Warning KML files, enhanced support for vertical profiles, and several new formulas. In addition, the release includes updates to existing features and incorporates the latest netCDF-Java library.
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.
