The Valparaiso University Meteorology program strives to keep current with meteorological technologies so students can maximize their educational opportunities. Valparaiso University's Meteorology program was awarded a 2012 Community Equipment Award grant to allow it to serve as a test school for the deployment of AWIPS II. Because our program has limited resources and infrastructure support, we provide an ideal "small school" test case for the deployment of AWIPS II.
The Unidata Users Committee is seeking nominations for a Graduate Student representative to join the group of nine university faculty members currently serving on this committee. Nominees should be Graduate Students who have completed at least one year of study, use Unidata software, and hold a strong interest in the Unidata program. Nominations may be made by any community member, and self-nominations are acceptable. This position will be for a two-year term.
The Unidata Program Center is pleased to announce its 2013 Software Training Workshop. The workshop features our display and analysis packages GEMPAK (with an introduction to AWIPS-II) and the IDV, data access and management tools, the Local Data Manager (LDM), the Network Common Data Form (netCDF), and the THREDDS Data Server (TDS).
The workshop will be held July 23 - August 8, 2013. Individual courses last from one to four days.
No one enjoys a mushy tomato. But beyond aesthetics lies a serious problem for some West African nations, where significant portions of the fresh tomato harvest may be lost during transport from farm to market.
Spatial agro-ecologists from the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) of the University of Twente in The Netherlands and elsewhere have used the IDV to analyze the relationship between observed weather conditions andthe microclimate inside truck trailers transporting tomatoes.
Members of the Unidata Program Center staff will be attending the 93nd annual American Meteorology Society meeting, January 6-10 2013, in Austin, Texas. Unidata will be in Booth 524 in the exhibit hall (map); 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.
Rutgers students use real-time data to pilot an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle
The Coastal Ocean Observation Lab at Rutgers University (RU-COOL) is using Unidata and other open source technologies to collect, process, and make available a wide range of ocean data for use by students and researchers. Their collection of real-time and historical oceanographic datasets will aid in understanding the physical and biological ocean processes impacting the Mid-Atlantic region, leading to improvements in maritime safety and ecosystem-based management strategies.
IDV 3.1 was released recently. Some of the major new features in this release include simplified capture of multi-view images and movies, enhanced labeling of latitude and longitude lines in map displays, and a new Time Matching feature that allows you to create a seamless animation of multiple displays whose data were collected at different time steps. Read further for additional details on these new features.
The University of Hawaii has installed a new X/L band antenna and satellite downlink that follows satellites that are part of the Polar Operational Environmental Satellite (POES) system. The university installation is intended to capture real time data useful for weather and ocean forecasts as the satellites pass over Hawaii. The project is a collaboration between UH Manoa, the National Weather Service (NWS) Honolulu Forecast Office (HFO), NWS Pacific Region Headquarters, the University of Wisconsin, and Honolulu Community College, where the antenna is installed.
The Unidata Program Center is pleased to welcome six 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 three members of the Policy committee. New members and those finishing their terms will overlap for one meeting, which will take place in mid-September, 2012.
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 for the September meeting.
The following provides 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.
Students in the University of Salento's Advanced Data Management course
Climate Change research is becoming an ever more data intensive and oriented scientific activity. Petabytes of climate data are continuously produced, delivered, accessed, and processed by scientists and researchers at multiple sites at an international level. The Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change (CMCC) and the University of Salento in Italy are using equipment purchased with a Unidata Community Equipment Grant to help students study climate change issues at both global and regional (Mediterranean area) scales.
