The Unidata Program Center is hiring! We are looking for a scientific software developer to join our team in creating and maintaining software and data services to support the geosciences.
We are looking for a software developer to help us help our community of scientists bridge the gaps between data servers, desktop scientific visualization packages like the Integrated Data Viewer, and “notebook”-style workflows (think Jupyter notebooks). We'll be integrating existing tools with new technologies to help scientists streamline the process of finding and analyzing data. At the Unidata Program Center, you'll have a chance to work with a great team in-house and an enthusiastic open source community.
The Unidata Program Center is hiring! We are looking for a scientific software developer to join our team in creating and maintaining software and data services to support the geosciences.
As part of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) in Boulder, CO, Unidata offers competitive salaries and great benefits. UCAR was selected as one of the Best Companies to Work For in Colorado. Simply put, Unidata is a great place to work. Unidata's team environment provides high levels of autonomy and responsibility with great opportunity to excel individually and contribute to the team's success.
Thanks to a 2015 Unidata Community Equipment Award grant, combined with matching funds from Plymouth State University, students working in the weather lab in Plymouth State's Department of Atmospheric Science & Chemistry now have 21 new workstations on which to use the Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) and AWIPS II.
During the 2015-16 academic year, the workstations were used heavily by students in a variety of classes, including Synoptic Meteorology, Atmospheric Physics, Instrumentation & Observations, Mesoscale Meteorology, Numerical Weather Prediction, Satellite & Radar Meteorology, and our meteorological computer application class, which provides in depth instruction with IDV and ISL. Furthermore, students used the workstations to produce scholarly research in areas such as atmospheric rivers, orographic precipitation, and explosive extratropical cyclone intensification over the North Pacific.
Vector display of air parcels in hurricane Sandy (Click to enlarge)
The Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) version 5.3 is now available. This version of IDV has notable system, display, and data improvements.
IDV 5.3 takes advantage of the latest versions of the netCDF-Java and VisAD libraries, both of which allow more efficient data access than previous versions. This leads to less memory use on the local system while still providing the same functionality as the prior IDV releases.
As part of the Unidata Program Center's continuing investigations into the use of Unidata technologies in cloud computing environments, UPC developers have created a version of the Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) that runs in a Docker container and displays the IDV interface in a web browser.
The CloudIDV container can be run on any computer that has the Docker containerization software installed — currently linux, MacOSX, and Windows versions of Docker are available. If you are already running Docker on your own system, you can easily experiment with the CloudIDV container. If you're new to Docker, read on for details on how to get started.
Unidata has developed a version of the IDV dubbed "CloudIDV." CloudIDV is designed for application streaming, allowing an instance of the IDV to be accessed via tablet, mobile phone, or even via a browser. These features are enabled through a fairly new technology called containerization. There are several containerization technologies in use; for CloudIDV we are using Docker.
Indiana University will be demonstrating the IDV running in the cloud at the Supercomputing 2015 conference being held November 15-19, 2015 in Austin TX.
If you're attending the conference, stop by booth 532 to see a range of exhibits from the Pervasive Technology Institute, the Global Research Network Operations Center, and the IU School of Informatics and Computing.
Editor's Note: Metropolitan State University of Denver (MSU) is one of a handful of universities of varying sizes that have incorporated AWIPS II into labs and classrooms in the past two years. MSU's experience shows that incorporating the new NWS technology into the educational mix is both possible and useful even for a small undergraduate program. This article outlines the MSU AWIPS II configuration and discusses some of the adjustments the program made to get the system running smoothly.
Thanks to a Unidata Community Equipment Award grant coupled with some local resources from our university, we (Professor Sam Ng and co-PI Chris Kimmett) at Metropolitan State University in Denver have been able to successfully bring the National Weather Service's AWIPS II forecasting system into the classroom. Professor Ng used AWIPS II alongside Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer as core tools in the Spring 2015 “Weather Analysis Techniques” course for undergraduate meteorology majors, and will continue using AWIPS II in the Fall semester and into the future.
