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 Unidata Program Center is pleased to welcome new members to the program's governing committees. Committee members normally serve three-year terms; terms are finishing up for six members of the Users committee and three members of the Strategic Advisory committee. New members and those finishing their terms will overlap for one meeting, which will take place at the end of September.
The UPC staff looks forward to working with our new committee members, and to having all the current members of both committees at the Program Center in Boulder, Colorado this fall.
The Unidata Program Center's summer student intern Josh Clark has come to the end of his summer appointment. After a summer of widely varying projects, Josh gave an overview of his accomplishments to the UPC staff on July 31, 2015.
Josh graduated from the University of Northern Colorado in the spring of 2015 with a B.S. in Meteorology. After spending the summer at the Unidata Program Center, he is headed to the graduate program at San Jose State's Fire Weather Research Lab.
The 2015 Unidata Users Workshop took place June 22-25 at UCAR's Center Green facility in Boulder, Colorado. The workshop's theme — Data-Driven Geoscience: Applications, Opportunities, Trends, and Challenges — drew participants from across the atmospheric and other geosciences communities. Attendees took part in a series of presentations and hands-on exercises that explored how trends in cloud computing and Python-based workflows affect how scientists interact with and manage ever-growing data volumes.
Eighteen presenters from the Unidata community shared their insights on incorporating new technologies into scientific workflows across the geosciences. Sessions investigated topics ranging from using python tools to access remote datasets and adding cloud computing resources to data-intensive processes to building literacy in scientific computing and preserving data resources and citations. In many cases, presenters encouraged other participants to follow along with hands-on examples and exercises.
National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Global Forecast System (GFS) model output with 0.25-degree resolution will be added to the Internet Data Distribution (IDD) CONDUIT data stream on July 28, 2015.
Update: GFS 0.25-degree output is now available via the CONDUIT data stream.
NCEP began producing the GFS model output with a 0.25-degree resolution for use in weather forecasting operations in January, 2015. Unidata Program Center staff have tested the 0.25-degree GFS model output internally and have been working with operators of top-level IDD relay sites to ensure that they have the capacity to handle the increased data volume associated with this new data stream. The approximate volume of the 0.25-degree GFS model output is 20 GB per model run, four times each day. For comparison, all of the current GFS model output delivered via CONDUIT (GFS 0.5-degree, 1-degree, and 2.5-degree) total approximately 5 GB per model run, four times each day.
Registration is open for Unidata's 2015 Software Training Workshop. The workshop features Unidata's display and analysis packages IDV and AWIPS-II (with GEMPAK), as well as data access and management tools including the Local Data Manager (LDM) and the THREDDS Data Server (TDS). This year's workshop will also include a session on using the Python programming language with Unidata technologies.
The workshop will be held July 20 – August 5, 2015. Individual courses last from one to three days.
The Unidata Program Center is happy to be hosting summer intern Josh Clark. Josh graduated from the University of Northern Colorado (UNC) in the spring of 2015 with a B.S. in Meteorology, and is headed to the graduate program at San Jose State's Fire Weather Research Lab this fall.
The Unidata Summer Internships offer 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.
MetPy is an Open Source project aimed at providing a Pythonic library for meteorological data analysis that meshes well with the rest of the scientific Python ecosystem. The project heavily leverages the work already done by the Numpy, Scipy, and Matplotlib projects, and adds on top functionality specific to meteorology: plotting (e.g. Skew-Ts), calculations, and reading files (e.g. WSR-88D NIDS files).
Workshop Update: We have received confirmation from the NSF that this year's workshop will take place as planned. If you were waiting to register, now is the time!
The Unidata Users Committee invites you to join Unidata staff, community members, and distinguished speakers this June in Boulder, Colorado. The goal of this year's workshop is to raise awareness of important new trends in geoscience technology, including cloud computing, data management, and the place of the Python language in geoscience computing infrastructure. The workshop is a chance for the academic community and share hands-on activities, course materials, and ideas for improving research and education.
Unidata's Motherlode demonstration server is currently in service. The machine was adversely affected by a power problem that necessitated the replacement of its power controller.
While Motherlode has been back in service since Saturday, we are still diagnosing some remaining issues that appear to have resulted from the original hardware problem. As a result, we are not yet ready to give the server a clean bill of health, and advise the community that the machine may experience additional down-time in the coming days.
We regret any inconvenience caused by interruptions in access to the demonstration server. Thank you for your patience while we finish resolving the hardware issues.
