Earlier this year, the Unidata Users Committee asked members of the Unidata community to participate in a survey regarding their use of scientific software packages, software training, and community services, and to favor us with their insights into possible future directions for the program. You can read an overview of the survey results in 2016 Community Survey Results.
While Unidata's governing committees and the Unidata Program Center staff will continue to analyze the survey comments in the process of crafting Unidata's next Strategic Plan, individual Program Center development groups are also using the survey as input into their own development plans. This series of articles provides responses from different development groups to comments or concerns raised by the survey. Under review in this article: Python activities at Unidata.
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 Manager will hold a key leadership position in the ESSO, providing project management, project execution, outreach, administration, and other operational support to ESSO's efforts in contributing to EarthCube's success. The Project Manager will have a wide degree of latitude to support ESSO's mission.
Larissa Gordon joined the Unidata Program Center as a summer communication intern on March 14th, 2016. Larissa has just completed her Bachelor's degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in Evolutionary Biology; she also earned minors in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science and Creative Writing, Fiction Studies.
Her primary interest in her undergraduate career was the interaction between biota and climate, specifically in a marine environment.
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.
Unidata offers equipment grants to support a variety of projects
Just a reminder that the 2016 Unidata Community Equipment Awards solicitation is open for new proposals through March 25, 2016. If you're looking for equipment (physical hardware or cloud-based services) to get your Unidata technology project off the ground, we encourage you to submit a proposal.
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 2016, a total of $100,000 is available for awards; proposals for amounts up to $20,000 will be considered.
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) membership has approved the OGC CF-netCDF 3.0 encoding using GML Coverage Application Schema, an extension to the OGC CF-netCDF 3.0 encoding standard.
The OGC CF-netCDF 3.0 encoding standard has emerged as a widely used and well supported data model and encoding for domains such as atmospheric science, oceanography, climatology, meteorology, and hydrology. It supports multi-dimensional data representing space and time-varying phenomena.
Members of the Unidata Program Center staff will be attending the 96th annual American Meteorology Society meeting, January 10-14 2014, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Unidata will be in Booth 224 in the exhibit hall; feel free to stop by to talk with us. The booth will feature live, hands-on demonstrations of Unidata software and services, including a look at the current state of the AWIPS II environment. Come and talk with the developers about what's coming up and what you'd like to see.
Read on for a schedule of selected sessions at which Unidata staff and community members will be presenting or attending.
Data management mandates from federal funding agencies, professional societies, and publishers are becoming more common at all scales of research effort. To help researchers navigate the new requirements and implement effective, low-overhead data management workflows, Unidata is hosting an AMS Short Course on Data Management Planning and Implementation: Training on available open-source tools and services from the community and Unidata. The short course will be held the afternoon of Sunday, 10 January 2016, preceding the 96th AMS Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.
The short course will provide information on the current mandates, present a researcher-focused approach to data management, and introduce freely available services and tools that can be combined to manage and share research data. The course is intended for practicing researchers who are interested in both meeting the current requirements and implementing “best practice” data management processes in their research effort. The course builds on and extends information available in Unidata's Data Management Resource Center.
The Big Data Project (BDP) is an initiative undertaken by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to increase public availability of large volumes of environmental data collected and generated by the agency. As part of the Big Data Project, Unidata is working in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) on a demonstration project to provide access to a more than twenty years of archived NEXRAD Level II radar data — augmented continuously with new, real-time data — stored in Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) environment. In addition to assisting AWS with ingesting new data flowing from the NEXRAD sites, Unidata Program Center staff have set up a THREDDS Data Server in the AWS environment to provide services allowing community access to the stored data.
The Unidata Program Center (UPC) is searching for atmospheric science researchers or research groups to participate in a pilot project aimed at designing and implementing robust data management workflows. The project aims to assist at least three community partners representing modest research projects of different scales in the implementation of data management processes that satisfy National Science Foundation and other federal funding agency requirements.
Beyond simply satisfying current funding proposal requirements, the project hopes to test effective methods of collecting, transforming, storing, and sharing atmospheric science data. The methods used will be documented and polished for broad community use as examples serving to guide similar projects. If successful, the project will give researchers tools to satisfy funding agency requirements while making their data more widely discoverable, available, open, and usable by others in the community.
