The Unidata program has been providing the geoscience community with access to and technical support for the GEMPAK software package for nearly thirty years. This post describes the current circumstances surrounding Unidata's support for GEMPAK, and suggests some possible future actions to ensure continued community access to this resource.
The Unidata Users Committee is seeking nominations for a Graduate Student representative to join the group of university faculty members who serve on this committee. Nominees should be Graduate Students who use Unidata software, hold a strong interest in the Unidata program, and have an interest in learning how a community-based program like Unidata is governed. Nominations may be made by any community member, and self-nominations are acceptable. This position will be for a two-year term beginning with the fall 2021 Users Committee meeting.
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.
The Unidata THREDDS Development Team released an updated version of the THREDDS Data Server (TDS) (and bundled netCDF-Java/Common Data Model (CDM) library) on February 23rd, 2021. This release contains a variety of bug fixes, as well as updates to third-party libraries, including security updates. A summary of changes, download links, and links to Docker Images can be found on the 4.6.16.1 GitHub release page.
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.
Nicole Corbin joined the Unidata Program Center on February 1st, 2021 as an Educational Designer. Prior to joining Unidata, Nicole created learning content and educational experiences for technical support staff at Esri focusing on desktop GIS, Microsoft Windows administration, Python, and customer service. Nicole is passionate about instructional design and is always keeping up on the latest in learning sciences. Her professional interests include adult learning theories, inquiry-based learning, and modular/micro-learning.
Although she's been working in the GIS sector for the past five years, Nicole's background is in meteorology. She received both her Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in Meteorology from North Carolina State University. It was there that she first became interested in discipline-based education research and pedagogy, and was able to experiment with creating educational content for university students. Her very first educational module covered hail growth processes. Now, at Unidata, she is excited to continue creating learning and outreach content for the greater Earth systems science community.
Version 1.0 of the MetPy collection of tools in Python for reading, visualizing, and performing calculations with weather data was released on December 22, 2020. MetPy provides tested, reusable Python components suitable to a wide array of tasks common in meteorological and atmospheric science applications, including scripted data visualization and analysis. In adding this functionality, MetPy aims to mesh well with the broader scientific Python ecosystem — widely used projects including Numpy, Scipy, Matplotlib, xarray, and others.
The Unidata THREDDS Development Team released version 5.4.1 of the netCDF-Java/Common Data Model (CDM) library on December 17th, 2020. The 5.4.1 release includes the first look at the public API, support for building with Java 11 - 14, and support for accessing data from object storage, such as AWS S3.
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 440 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 spring 2021 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.
Unidata offers computer equipment grants to support a variety of projects
The Unidata Program Center is pleased to announce the opening of the 2021 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 2021, a total of $100,000 is available for awards; proposals for amounts up to $20,000 will be considered.
Past recipients of Unidata equipment awards have used the grants to procure equipment for data sharing, to create interactive data visualization laboratories, and to encourage the use of Unidata software packages in research and education.
