The Unidata Program Center is pleased to welcome Inken Purvis to our staff. Inken joined us as an Administrative Assistant on March 2, 2015; she'll be the Program Center's new Travel Coordinator, among other administrative duties.
Prior to coming to the UPC, Inken has worked in a variety of marketing and administrative roles in the financial services, publishing, and (most recently) pharmaceutical sectors. Her experience doing meeting support, event planning, and travel arrangement fills an obvious need here at the Program Center, but that's just a beginning.
As many in the Unidata community are aware, on January 14, 2015 the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) began producing Global Forecast System (GFS) model output with 0.25-degree resolution for use in weather forecasting operations. This output is now available to be added to the Unidata Internet Data Distribution (IDD) system's CONDUIT data stream.
We would like to better understand the level of interest in receiving this model output among Unidata community members. We are also soliciting information on Unidata sites' capacity to receive this volume of data via the CONDUIT "push" mechanism. We have created a short online questionnaire to collect community input; read on for details.
Unidata offers equipment grants to support a variety of projects
The Unidata Program Center is pleased to announce the opening of the 2015 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 2015, a total of $100,000 is available for awards; proposals for amounts up to $20,000 will be considered.
Members of the Unidata Program Center staff will be attending the 95th annual American Meteorology Society meeting, January 4-8 2014, in Phoenix, Arizona. Unidata will be in Booth 220 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.
The Balearic Islands Coastal Ocean Observing and Forecasting System (SOCIB), is a multi-platform Marine Research Infrastructure located in the Mediterranean Sea. A joint initiative between the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación) and the Balearic Islands Government (Govern de les Illes Balears), SOCIB provides free, open and quality-controlled data from nearshore to the open sea.
News of this innovative use of THREDDS and other Unidata technologies in the Balearic Islands Coastal Ocean Observing and Forecasting System (SOCIB) came to us as a result of UPC staff participation at the Ocean Data Interoperability Platform (ODIP) conference earlier this year.
The registration deadline has been extended to October 10, 2014.
Remember that registration for Unidata's upcoming 2014 Software Training Workshop is open until October 10, 2014. The workshop features Unidata's display and analysis packages GEMPAK (with an introduction to AWIPS-II) and the IDV, 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 October 21 – November 6, 2014 in Boulder, Colorado. Individual courses last from one to four days.
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 three members of the Users committee and one member of the Strategic Advisory committee. New members and those finishing their terms will overlap for one meeting, which will take place in September (Users Committee) and October (Strategic Advisory Committee) of 2014.
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.
Read on for a brief introduction to the scientists joining Unidata's committees.
Unidata summer 2014 interns Shawn Cheeks and Florita Rodriguez
The Unidata Program Center's two summer student interns — Florita Rodriguez from Texas A&M Univeristy in College Station, TX, and Shawn Cheeks from Marshall University in Huntington, WV — have come to the end of their summer appointments. After a summer's dilligent work, they presented the results of their projects to the UPC staff on July 29, 2014.
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.
Unidata is governed by its community. Our governing committees facilitate consensus building for future directions of the Unidata Program and establish standards of involvement for the community.
The Unidata Program Center is seeking new people to serve on Unidata's Strategic Advisory and Users Committees. This is your chance to make a difference on behalf of the Unidata community. As William Gallus, the current Chair of the Unidata Strategic Advisory Committee notes, "Serving as a member of these committees puts you in the driver's seat to help shape the future of Unidata and thus the future of real time weather data delivery and the means to work with it."
