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.
Do you know someone in the Unidata community who has been actively involved and helpful to you and other Unidata members? Perhaps this is someone who volunteers to assist others, contributes software, or makes suggestions that are generally useful for the community.
The Unidata Users Committee invites you to submit nominations for the Russell L. DeSouza Award for Outstanding Community Service. This Community Service Award honors individuals whose energy, expertise, and active involvement enable the Unidata Program to better serve the geosciences. Honorees personify Unidata's ideal of a community that shares ideas, data, and software through computing and networking technologies. While direct involvement in the Unidata community is one avenue by which such a contribution may be made, this is not a requirement — the distinguishing ethos of awardees is their contribution and dedication to accessible and reproducible science and education in the geosciences.
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.
We are looking for a software developer to help us help our community of scientists access the Earth system science data that fuels their research. You'll have a chance work with a great team at the Unidata Program Center and and enthusiastic open source community to test, maintain, and develop Unidata software projects including netCDF-Java, the THREDDS Data Server, Rosetta, Siphon, and other Java- and Python-based client and web technologies.
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 gives you a chance to describe and comment on your use of Unidata's various data analysis and visualization software packages. We'd love to hear your thoughts on how we're doing and what we can do better.
Members of the Unidata Program Center staff will be attending the 100th annual American Meteorology Society meeting, 12-16 January 2020 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center in Boston, Massachusetts.
Things are a little different with the Unidata booth in the Exhibit hall this year. Unidata staff will be spending time at the larger, combined UCAR/NCAR booth (#309) — stop by to talk with us and see what else is happening at UCAR. The booth will feature live, hands-on demonstrations of Unidata software and services, including a look at the current state of the AWIPS, IDV, MetPy, and THREDDS Data Server packages. As always, you can talk with the developers about what's coming up and what you'd like to see.
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.
Do you use Unidata software packages? Do you love to write code? The Unidata Summer Internship program is looking for you!
The Unidata Summer Internship offers undergraduate and graduate students an opportunity to work with Unidata software engineers and scientists on projects drawn from a wide variety of areas in the atmospheric and computational sciences. Unidata's mission is to support the Earth Science research and education community with data and tools for data access, analysis, and visualization. As a Unidata intern, you'll pursue the goal of adding innovative enhancements to data access, analysis, and visualization tools developed within Unidata.
Unidata offers computer equipment grants to support a variety of projects
The Unidata Program Center is pleased to announce the opening of the 2020 Unidata Community Equipment Awards solicitation. Created under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation, Unidata equipment awards are intended to encourage new members from diverse disciplinary backgrounds in the geosciences to join the Unidata community, and to encourage existing members to continue their active participation, enhancing the community process. For 2020, a total of $100,000 is available for awards; proposals for amounts up to $20,000 will be considered.
Note: In keeping with Unidata's most recent proposal to the National Science Foundation for continued program funding, additional emphasis will be placed on providing support for institutions serving populations that are underrepresented in the broad geoscience community. Unidata is dedicated to broadening participation by minority serving institutions, and we particularly encourage small institutions, academic departments that have not previously submitted proposals to this program, and programs outside Unidata's traditional atmospheric sciences community to apply.
The Unidata Program Center is hiring! We are looking for a Python developer to join our team in creating and maintaining software and data services to support the geosciences.
We are looking for a Python developer to help us help our community of scientists access the Earth system science data that fuels their research. As a member of the Python team, you will collaborate with other Unidata developers to test, support, maintain, and develop Unidata open source software products and real-time data streams.
Pete Pokrandt of the University of Wisconsin, Madison has been awarded the 2019 Russell L. DeSouza Award by the Unidata Users committee. The DeSouza Award honors “individuals whose energy, expertise, and active involvement enable the Unidata Program to better serve the geosciences.”
Pokrandt has been supporting the needs of geoscience data users at the University of Wisconsin and around the Unidata community since the 1990s; he served on the Unidata Users Committee from 2015 through 2018.
