Thanks to a 2015 Unidata Community Equipment Award grant, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Atmospheric Science Program has been able to acquire a dedicated AWIPS II Environmental Data EXchange (EDEX) server and three Common AWIPS Visualization Environment (CAVE) workstations. The machines were deployed in our Atmospheric Science computer lab in mid-August 2015, just prior to the start of the 2015-16 academic year. Over the past year, our program has seen maximum benefit from these resources in two areas: strengthening our partnership with the Milwaukee/Sullivan, Wisconsin National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office (MKX) and as a tool to enhance student development outside of a formal classroom setting.
Version 4.6.0 of the netCDF Operators (NCO) has been released. NCO is an Open Source package that consists of a dozen standalone, command-line programs that take netCDF files as input, then operate (e.g., derive new data, average, print, hyperslab, manipulate metadata) and output the results to screen or files in text, binary, or netCDF formats.
The NCO project is coordinated by Professor Charlie Zender of the Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine. More information about the project, along with binary and source downloads, are available on the SourceForge project page.
Rosetta, one of Unidata's data transformation tools, is helping the scientific community with the standardization of data. Created by Unidata software engineer Sean Arms, Rosetta is strengthening the science community's ability to standardize raw data by providing an easy way to add appropriate metadata to ASCII files, allowing them to save and store the files in either an ASCII format (e.g. .csv) or in Climate and Forecast (CF)-compliant netCDF files. Most recently, Rosetta has helped Millersville University transform weather balloon data collected as part of a nationwide experiment.
Millersville University has been involved in an experiment known as PECAN (Plains Elevated Convection at Night). The experiment involves eight research laboratories and fourteen Universities. They share the common goal of finding the cause of an increase of mesoscale convective storms (MCSes) that occur at night during the summer months.
Earlier this year, the Unidata Users Committee asked members of the Unidata community to participate in a survey regarding their use of scientific software packages, software training, and community services, and to favor us with their insights into possible future directions for the program. The survey ran through early February, and collected responses from 261 individuals from 25 countries. Both the Users Committee and the Unidata Program Center staff thank those who completed the survey for taking the time to participate and for providing such thoughtful feedback.
The survey comprised 107 questions on a variety of topics (although the survey was structured to allow respondents to skip over sections in which they had little interest or expertise). Read on for a summary and access to the full survey results.
Registration is now open for Unidata's 2016 Software Training Workshop. The workshop features an exploration of Python in the context of Unidata technologies, courses on Unidata's display and analysis packages IDV and AWIPS-II (with GEMPAK), as well as courses on data access and management tools including the Local Data Manager (LDM) and the THREDDS Data Server (TDS).
The workshop will be held October 17 – November 1, 2016. Individual courses last from one to three days.
The National Data Integrity Conference is a gathering of people sharing new challenges and solutions regarding research data and integrity. The conference aims to provide attendees with both an understanding of data integrity issues and impart practical tools and skills to deal with them. Topics addressed will include data privacy, openness, policy, education and the impacts of sharing data, how to do it, when to do it, and when not to.
Unidata is pleased to announce the availability of the Python Data Access Framework (DAF). The DAF provides access to an AWIPS II Environmental Data EXchange (EDEX) server directly from Python code. Created by Unidata Program Center software engineer Michael James, the DAF strengthens Unidata's AWIPS II offerings by making it easier to retrieve data from the AWIPS II data storage system from outside the Common AWIPS Visualization Environment (CAVE).
Users have always been able to request real time NCEP/NWS weather data using AWIPS II, but now, with the addition of the Python DAF, users can request this data using only simple python commands.
Unidata is governed by its community. Our governing committees facilitate consensus-building for future directions of the Unidata Program and establish standards of involvement for the community.
The Unidata Program Center is seeking new people to serve on Unidata's Strategic Advisory and Users Committees. This is your chance to make a difference on behalf of the Unidata community. As William Gallus, the current Chair of the Unidata Strategic Advisory Committee notes, “Serving as a member of these committees puts you in the driver's seat to help shape the future of Unidata and thus the future of real time weather data delivery and the means to work with it.”
The 2016 UCAR Software Engineering Assembly (SEA) Software Engineering Conference and Tutorials (https://sea.ucar.edu/conference/2016) just wrapped up at UCAR's Center Green facility in Boulder, Colorado. The week long conference took place April 4–8, 2016, and focused on “Data Science for scientific disciplines.” Unidata staff were on hand, and on the final day, held a python tutorial titled “Visualizing meteorological data with Python: Use cases with Siphon and MetPy.” Over 40 people participated in the tutorial.
