The American Geophysical Union will be holding online elections between August 29 and September 27, 2016. Individuals elected will serve in leadership positions on the AGU Board of Directors as well as various councils, sections, and focus groups.
All AGU members will receive ballots for the Board (four positions, eight candidates) and student and early-career positions (two positions, four candidates). Members will also receive a ballot for every section and focus group to which they belong. Members of the Earth and Space Science Informatics (ESSI) focus group will notice that the Unidata Program Center's Jeff Weber is a candidate to serve as the ESSI president during the coming term.
Thanks to a 2015 Unidata Community Equipment Award grant, combined with matching funds from Plymouth State University, students working in the weather lab in Plymouth State's Department of Atmospheric Science & Chemistry now have 21 new workstations on which to use the Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) and AWIPS II.
During the 2015-16 academic year, the workstations were used heavily by students in a variety of classes, including Synoptic Meteorology, Atmospheric Physics, Instrumentation & Observations, Mesoscale Meteorology, Numerical Weather Prediction, Satellite & Radar Meteorology, and our meteorological computer application class, which provides in depth instruction with IDV and ISL. Furthermore, students used the workstations to produce scholarly research in areas such as atmospheric rivers, orographic precipitation, and explosive extratropical cyclone intensification over the North Pacific.
Matthew Perna joined the Unidata Program Center (UPC) team on June 6th of 2016 as a systems administrator. A native New Yorker, he moved to Fort Collins, CO from Long Island, NY in April, 2016.
Matt attended the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University before he earned his first Microsoft Systems Engineer (MCSE) in 1998. Since then, he has accrued 21 certifications for Microsoft system engineering.
The Unidata Program Center is hiring! We are looking for a scientific Python developer to join our team in creating and maintaining software and data services to support the geosciences.
As part of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) in Boulder, CO, Unidata offers competitive salaries and great benefits. UCAR was selected as one of the Best Companies to Work For in Colorado. Simply put, Unidata is a great place to work. Unidata's team environment provides high levels of autonomy and responsibility with great opportunity to excel individually and contribute to the team's success.
The Bachelor of Science Meteorology Program at Western Kentucky University, housed within the Department of Geography and Geology, is currently the only meteorology program in Kentucky and Tennessee that meets all Federal Civil Service requirements for employment by the National Weather Service and enables broadcast meteorologists to immediately pursue the “Certified Broadcast Meteorologist” program of the American Meteorological Society upon graduation. The program is facilitated by a variety of atmospheric science centers and laboratories, including the College Heights Atmospheric Observatory for Students (CHAOS), the Kentucky Mesonet, and the Kentucky State Climate Center. Faculty and students within the WKU Meteorology Program also maintain close working relations with the National Weather Service-Louisville and other nearby offices for lectures, workshops, storm surveys, and student employment.
The emphasis of the WKU Meteorology Program is on advanced theoretical and applied coursework, coupled with student engaged, hands-on active learning with meteorological instruments, field work, and data visualization. Students undergo extensive training in each course using a variety of Unidata and other software for data visualization regarding forecasting and research applications.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) EarthCube initiative is a community-driven project aimed at creating an integrated environment for the sharing of geoscience data and knowledge in an open, transparent, and inclusive manner. EarthCube is governed and guided by its Leadership Council, Standing Committees, Teams, and Working Groups. The community-based EarthCube Science Support Office (ESSO) is being created within UCAR in Boulder, Colorado to oversee and govern EarthCube project activities.
The Project Coordinator will provide experienced operational support to program management and represent the office in committee, community, and governance engagement.
In the summer of 2015, from June 1st to July 15th, a fleet of scientists set out each evening in the Midwest. Their goal? To gain insight on the nocturnal mesoscale convective storms (MCS's) that plague America's heartland. While MCS's are necessary for irrigation and the replenishing of aquifers, often these storms can become vicious; especially at night when they are least detected.
With the implementation of the field experiment PECAN (Plains Elevated Convection at Night) scientists from eight research laboratories and fourteen Universities including Millersville University of Pennsylvania hope to gain insight to better predict these nocturnal storms. After the data were collected, the Unidata Program Center (UPC) worked closely with Millersville students and academic staff to help standardize their PECAN study data.
Unidata is searching for a second round of geoscience researchers or research groups to participate in an NSF-funded pilot project aimed at implementing publicly-available, robust data management workflows. The initial round of this project assisted three atmospheric science projects that collected data including model output, airplane-based lidar data, and observations from a large field campaign. The second round seeks to identify additional community partners with different data management requirements.
In addition to helping researchers satisfy current funding proposal requirements, we hope to test effective methods of collecting, transforming, storing, and sharing atmospheric or related geoscience data. The methods used will be documented and published for broad community application as examples in Unidata's Data Management Resource Center (DMRC), serving to guide similar projects.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) EarthCube initiative is a community-driven project aimed at creating an integrated environment for the sharing of geoscience data and knowledge in an open, transparent, and inclusive manner. All members of the geoscience community are invited to participate in the 2016 EarthCube All Hands Meeting, to be held July 6-8, 2016 in Denver, Colorado.
The theme for this year's meeting is “EarthCube Connects,” emphasizing the connectivity between cyberinfrastructure (CI) technologies, geoscience domains, and geoscientists that is EarthCube's focus.
Providing data services and tools to the geoscience community is at the core of Unidata's efforts. In addition to providing direct access to data (through the Internet Data Distribution network, LDM software, and THREDDS Data Servers), Unidata also strives to make community members aware of other services that provide support for our community's research.
In February of 2013, Unidata's long time collaborative partner, the University of Wisconsin's Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC), began a program at the SSEC Data Center to provide a limited amount of archived geostationary satellite data to Unidata's academic community members at no cost. This post is a friendly reminder that members of Unidata's academic community can register with SSEC and receive up to 5 Gigabytes of archived data each month free of charge. We encourage you to investigate this valuable data resource.
