Members of the Unidata Program Center staff will be attending the 92nd annual American Meteorology Society meeting, January 22-26 2012, in New Orleans. Unidata will be in Booth 322 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.
The American Geophysical Union's 2011 Fall Meeting in San Francisco has come to a close, but Unidata Program Center staff enjoyed meeting and talking with community members over the course of the weeklong event. More than 20,000 people attended the meeting, presenting some 12,000 posters and giving 6,000 oral presentations, not to mention the countless impromptu discussions taking place in every corner of the Moscone convention center.
The Unidata Program Center has received a commendation from the National Weather Service's Spaceflight Meteorology Group, thanking the program for providing the Local Data Manger software and technical support for both the LDM and McIDAS packages. Over the course of the Space Shuttle program, the LDM was used to transport observational and experimental data from a variety of sources, including the NWS and the University of Wisconsin Space Science and Engineering Center.
The National Centers for Environmental Prediction have begun providing Fire Weather output from selected areas of the North American Mesoscale (NAM) model via Unidata's CONDUIT feed. The additional data were added into the CONDUIT feed on September 20, 2011.
The Unidata Program Center is pleased to welcome six new members to our governing committees. Committee members normally serve three-year terms; these terms are finishing up for four members of the Users committee and two members of the Policy committee. New members and those finishing their terms will overlap for one meeting, which will take place in mid-October, 2011.
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 October meeting.
The following provides a brief introduction to the scientists joining Unidata's committees. You can additional information about the governing committees, including contact information for committee members, on the Governing Committees page.
Researchers from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia; the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York; the department of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) at the University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands; and the University of Warwick in Coventry, United Kingdom are using the IDV to help analyze environmental stresses on marine corals. The stress factors include high temperatures, ultra-violet radiation, weather systems, sedimentation, as well as stress-reducing factors such as temperature variability and tidal dynamics. Their paper Global Gradients of Coral Exposure to Environmental Stresses and Implications for Local Management, was published in the online journal PLoS One and has been featured in other scientific magazines including Nature.
ISU student Ryan Lueck uses the IDV to display data from ISU's THREDDS server.
The Iowa State University Department of Geological and Atmospheric Sciences maintains an extensive archive of meteorological data, including textual information (severe weather statements and other National Weather Service products), numerical model output in gempak format, gif images of weather maps created daily since 2006, and gempak-format surface and upper air data going back to 1933, much of which was provided to us by NOAA's National Severe Storms Laboratory. For the past year or two, we have made NMQ estimates of precipitation available on the archive as well.
The Unidata Program Center will be moving into the Anthes building.
The Unidata Program Center has spiffy new lodgings.
Update: Our move to the new building is (more or less) complete. Come by and visit us in our snazzy (if temporary) new building.
It's only temporary, and it's only across the street, but the Program Center offices (along with the offices of most of the programs that make up the UCAR Community Programs — UCP) will be moving to new digs during the week of August 8, 2011. As a result, we may be slow to respond to phone calls and e-mail support questions during the transition. If all goes according to plan, we'll be in the new space beginning on Monday, August 15th.
Unidata is governed by its community. Our governing committees facilitate consensus building for future directions for the Unidata Program and establish standards of involvement for the community.
This fall, we are seeking new people to serve on Unidata's Policy and Users Committees. This is your chance to make a difference on behalf of the Unidata community. As Steven Businger, the current Chair of the Unidata Policy Committee states, "Over time, these two governing committees have provided important guidance in setting goals, accomplishing objectives, and helping to set future directions for the program."
Sean Arms joined the Unidata Program Center software development staff on May 23rd, 2011. Sean comes to Unidata from the University of Oklahoma, where he completed his Bachelor's, Master's, and most recently Doctoral degrees in Meteorology.
Sean is a familiar face to the rest of the Program Center staff; in addition to attending numerous Unidata workshops over the years, he served as the first student representative to the Unidata Users committee. "I got involved after Unidata's 2006 Triennial workshop," Sean says. "I was so impressed when I learned that the National Science Foundation was funding this community-driven, service oriented organization; I wanted to get involved however I could." Sean talked with members of the Users committee at that meeting, pointing out that many students were using Unidata software and data streams and asking why there was no student representation on the committee. "That's when I learned that suggesting can be the same as volunteering," he says.
