Mike Zuranski of the College of DuPage has been awarded the 2020 Russell L. DeSouza Award by the Unidata Users committee. The DeSouza Award honors “individuals whose energy, expertise, and active involvement enable the Unidata Program to better serve the geosciences.”
Zuranski has been contributing to the well-known NexLab site as a student at the College of DuPage in 2011, and has been a Meteorology Support Analyst for the program since 2016.
Spend the summer in beautiful Boulder, Colorado (maybe...)
Do you use Unidata software packages? Do you love to write code? The Unidata Summer Internship program is looking for you!
The Unidata Summer Internship offers 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's mission is to support the Earth Science research and education community with data and tools for data access, analysis, and visualization. As a Unidata intern, you'll pursue the goal of adding innovative enhancements to data access, analysis, and visualization tools developed within Unidata.
Unidata is looking for graduate and undergraduate students in the geosciences to share their views on remote learning environments. The Unidata Users Committee and Unidata Program Center staff want to hear about your experiences, needs, and wishes for remote learning during a special online discussion session.
The panel discussion will be held be from 1:00 to 1:55 PM MST on November 13, 2020. We're hoping to have roughly six students representing a variety of atmospheric science and related programs share their thoughts about what works well in remote learning situations, what doesn't work, and what might be done to improve the experience. Each student will have a short opportunity (3-4 minutes) to share their experience, followed by a dialogue with the Users Committee. A synthesis of the discussion will be shared with the Unidata community to communicate lessons learned.
In the spring of 2020, Unidata made an offer of resources through the Science Gateway project in order to facilitate online learning in response to the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic. Since that time, nearly three hundred and fifty users — mostly undergraduates in atmospheric science programs — have been able to take advantage of cloud-based resources to access pre-configured computational notebooks for learning and teaching objectives.
For the fall 2020 term, Unidata is once again offering to provide universities (or individual instructors) access to cloud-based JupyterHub servers tailored to the needs of university atmospheric science courses and workshops. By using the Unidata Science Gateway, instructors can add Jupyter notebooks used in their coursework to a dedicated JupyterHub hosted using Unidata's resources in the NSF Jetstream cloud. Once logged in to the JupyterHub, individual students access pre-configured computing environments that allow them to work with the notebooks interactively, making and saving their own alterations to existing notebooks or creating their own new notebooks.
The conventions for CF (Climate and Forecast) metadata are designed to promote the processing and sharing of files created with the NetCDF API. There will be a virtual workshop to meet and discuss CF-related topics held June 9-11, 2020; meetings are limited to three hours each day.
Here at the Unidata Program Center, we know that geoscience data is important to you, and we want to do all we can to keep you informed as the efforts to slow the spread of coronavirus continue.
Although we are dedicated to maintaining community access to our data services, the National Science Foundation has not declared the Program Center to be critical infrastructure. Access to our physical location is currently highly restricted. As a result, Unidata will be providing
geoscience data for pickup1 and delivery2 only
at least until social distancing recommendations are eased.
Unidata's Science Gateway can provide cloud-based JupyterHub servers tailored to the needs of university atmospheric science courses. Because many universities are responding to local public health mandates related to the COVID-19 epidemic by transitioning to the use of remote-learning techniques and online-only courses, Unidata is encouraging community members to evaluate whether this no-cost resource can benefit their students during the Spring term.
The Unidata Users Committee is organizing a series of regional workshops designed to follow the 2018 Unidata Users Workshop Reducing Time to Science: Evolving Workflows for Geoscience Research and Education. These follow-on workshops will explore tools to access data and strategies for teaching computational concepts. Each one-day workshop will bring together geoscience educators, pedagogical experts, and Unidata staff to discuss and share best practices for helping students engage in data-enabled science.
This year's annual American Meteorological Society meeting was held 12-16 January 2020 in Boston, Massachusetts. Unidata Program Center staff were happy to be able to attend as presenters of talks and posters, conveners of sessions, and facilitators of workshops and short courses for students, educators, and researchers. Staff members also spent time meeting community members in the new exhibit hall booth bringing together a variety of UCAR and NCAR programs in one space. As always, we were also glad to meet so many prospective community members at the AMS Student Conference.
With so much going on at the conference, we can't cover everything here. Instead, we present some highlights as recalled by UPC staff members who attended.
Do you know someone in the Unidata community who has been actively involved and helpful to you and other Unidata members? Perhaps this is someone who volunteers to assist others, contributes software, or makes suggestions that are generally useful for the community.
The Unidata Users Committee invites you to submit nominations for the Russell L. DeSouza Award for Outstanding Community Service. This Community Service Award honors individuals whose energy, expertise, and active involvement enable the Unidata Program to better serve the geosciences. Honorees personify Unidata's ideal of a community that shares ideas, data, and software through computing and networking technologies. While direct involvement in the Unidata community is one avenue by which such a contribution may be made, this is not a requirement — the distinguishing ethos of awardees is their contribution and dedication to accessible and reproducible science and education in the geosciences.
