Unidata developer Ryan May is a co-PI on a recently-awarded grant by the National Science Foundation's EarthCube program. The grant, which brings together collaborators from Unidata, NCAR's Computational & Information Systems Laboratory (CISL), NCAR's Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory (CGD), and the University at Albany, SUNY, funds Project Pythia: A Community Learning Resource for Geoscientists.
Project Pythia aims to provide web-accessible training to help current and future geoscientists understand and use the ever-expanding volume of numerical scientific data. The project will leverage Jupyter Notebooks as the primary delivery mechanism for training examples, curricula, and as an interactive computing platform. The content for Project Pythia will be hosted on GitHub and maintained using an Open Development model that will facilitate and encourage contributions from a broad user community, as well as help ensure the long-term sustainability of the project.
MetPy 1.0 Release Candidate 2 has been released. The biggest change is that now XArray DataArrays can be returned from most calculations when they are passed as inputs (this may break some code not expecting this behavior). This is the final planned release candidate before the full 1.0 release (planned in about a month), so any testing and feedback is appreciated, especially in the DataArray support. We should also have a 1.0 upgrade guide available soon in the documentation.
UCAR's COMET program is pleased to announce the availability of a new resource for instructors teaching university undergraduate meteorology courses. The University Course Support collection is intended to support university faculty and students in their increasingly virtual learning by mapping MetEd lesson content to U.S. university meteorology course curricula.
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 Unidata Program Center's three summer student interns — Russell Manser from Texas Tech University, Caitlyn McAllister from Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, and Lauren Prox from George Mason University — have come to the end of their summer appointments. After a summer of dedicated work they presented the results of their projects to the UPC staff on July 28, 2020. You can find videos of their presentations to the UPC staff on the Unidata Seminar Series page.
The Unidata THREDDS Development Team released updated versions of the THREDDS Data Server (TDS) and netCDF-Java/Common Data Model (CDM) library on June 17, 2020. In addition to feature enhancements, these releases contain a variety of updates to third-party libraries, including security updates. They also address a problem in previous versions that could lead to data returned by some NetcdfSubsetService (NCSS) requests being corrupted. While the circumstances under which the problem occurs are very specific (and rare), because the possibility of data corruption exists the development team strongly recommends these upgrades to anyone using netCDF-Java/CDM or TDS. TDS administrators who are not able to upgrade immediately should disable the NetcdfSubsetService until it is possible to do so.
The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) is accepting nominations for its Board of Trustees, President's Advisory Committee on University Relations, and Membership committees. These are excellent opportunities to support the Earth System Science community.
