This year's annual American Meteorological Society meeting in Austin, Texas hosted more than 3400 attendees — more than the 2012 meeting — despite the fact that many government employees were unable to attend due to uncertainties about the federal budget. We were happy to see many of the Unidata community members participating in the meeting at our booth in the exhibit hall, and 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.
Scientific data formats such as NetCDF have made great strides in areas like interoperability, scalability, and data compression. By comparison, methods for representing the uncertainty inherent in the values stored in scientific data sets are less robust. A group organized by researchers from the National Research Council of Italy's Institute for Atmospheric Pollution Research is trying to address this issue by creating a set of conventions for the representation of uncertainty values associated with data stored in NetCDF files.
A discussion paper describing ideas for storing uncertainty values is available, and an electronic mail list has been created to allow broad community discussion of the proposal.
Members of Unidata's two governing committees gathered in Boulder in September 2012 for a joint meeting to share information and ideas between the committees and with Unidata Program Center staff.
The Open Geospatial Consortium membership has approved the Enhanced Data Model Extension to the OGC Network Common Data Form (netCDF) Core Encoding Standard. The OGC has previously approved the netCDF Core Encoding Standard, the netCDF Binary Encoding Extension Standard-netCDF Classic, and the 64-bit Offset Format. All of the OGC's netCDF standards documents are available for free download from the OGC network Common Data Forum (netCDF) standards suite page.
IDV 3.1 was released recently. Some of the major new features in this release include simplified capture of multi-view images and movies, enhanced labeling of latitude and longitude lines in map displays, and a new Time Matching feature that allows you to create a seamless animation of multiple displays whose data were collected at different time steps. Read further for additional details on these new features.
The Unidata Program Center is pleased to welcome six new members to the program's governing committees. Committee members normally serve three-year terms; terms are finishing up for three members of the Users committee and three members of the Policy committee. New members and those finishing their terms will overlap for one meeting, which will take place in mid-September, 2012.
The UPC staff looks forward to working with our new committee members, and to having all the current members of both committees at the Program Center in Boulder, Colorado for the September meeting.
The following provides a brief introduction to the scientists joining Unidata's committees. You can find additional information about the governing committees, including contact information for committee members, on the Governing Committees page.
On August 21, 2012, NCEP will be upgrading the Short-Range Ensemble Forecast System (SREF). SREF output is delivered to Unidata community members via the CONDUIT data stream.
Unidata Program Center developer John Caron has been thinking a lot about HDF5's Dimension Scales, how they relate to netCDF's Shared Dimensions, and why data should be written with the netCDF-4 library using Shared Dimensions.
Version 4.2.1 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.
