Shay Carter joined the Unidata team on September 3rd, 2019 as a Software Engineer and Programmer. Originally from Canada, she moved from Phoenix, Arizona to take over this new position.
Shay earned her Bachelor's and Master's degree from Arizona State University (ASU). Her undergraduate studies consisted of a major in Earth and Space Exploration, with a minor in Computational Mathematical Sciences. She also graduated from Barrett, the Honors College at ASU. She went on to pursue a Master's degree in Biomedical Engineering, where she studied stem cells and developed her own genetic quantification algorithm and program in Java. She has spent the last 9 years working at the Mars Space Flight Facility at ASU, and has primarily been a Software Developer on the JMARS GIS program.
The Unidata Program Center is pleased to welcome new members to the program's governing committees. Committee members serve three-year terms, meeting twice each year to provide feedback on the effectiveness of the Unidata Program and advise staff on issues facing the university community. Appointments reflect the range of large and small colleges and universities with undergraduate and graduate emphases where Unidata systems are in use.
Read on for a brief introduction to the scientists joining Unidata's committees. You can find additional information about the governing committees, including contact information for committee members, on the Governing Committees page.
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.
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.
Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Indiana will be hosting a Unidata Regional Software Training Workshop August 12-13, 2019. Unidata software developers will be leading the two-day Python-focused workshop, which will cover the use of the MetPy and Siphon packages in the context of atmospheric science. A basic familiarity with Python is assumed — check out the Unidata Online Python Training site for a refresher.
Unidata holds regional workshops in part to facilitate easy access to software training for those who may not be able to travel to training workshops held at the Unidata Program Center in Boulder, Colorado. Attendance is explicitly not limited to Valparaiso students and staff; we encourage those within easy travel distance to consider attending.
A number of new screencasts describing concepts and techniques related to using Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) have been posted to the Unidata YouTube channel. The videos were created as part of Unidata 2019 intern Jessica Blunt's summer projects, and cover a variety of basic IDV tasks using the most recent IDV release (version 5.6).
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.
As Unidata entered the final year of the most recent NSF proposal period, which ended on March 31, 2019, Program Center staff and members of Unidata's governing committees engaged in countless conversations about the future direction of the program. The impact of existing programs, requests from community members for new or augmented services, and prognostications about the future needs of the geoscience educators and researchers all figured into the discussions. The resulting proposal, titled Unidata: Next-generation Data Services and Workflows to Advance Geoscience Research and Education, was awarded by NSF with an official start date of May 1, 2019.
The Unidata Program Center will be altering the IDD NIMAGE datastream to contain all of the GOES-16 and GOES-17 Level 2 image products that are currently being being sent in the IDD NOTHER and HDS datastreams.
We plan to begin distributing a reconstituted NIMAGE feed from our top level IDD relay clusters (idd.unidata.ucar.edu and iddb.unidata.ucar.edu) in the mid-June time frame.
