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.”
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."
On February 5, 2014, three Unidata Program Center staff members paid a visit to Professor Sam Ng and his collaborator Chris Kimmett at Metropolitan State University of Denver. We had the opportunity to sit in on Professor Ng's "Weather Analysis Techniques" course for undergraduate meteorology majors in the MSU department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
MSU-Denver is the recipient of one of Unidata's 2014 Community Equipment Awards. Their proposal solicited funds to update the meteorology program's Local Data Manager (LDM) server to better handle current data loads and also serve as a beta-test site for the AWIPS II Environmental Data EXchange (EDEX) server, giving students the opportunity to the National Weather Service's most up-to-date forecasting and weather analysis software package. The grant also funded upgrades to the MSU-Denver meteorology department's computer lab, allowing students to access the AWIPS II CAVE client and improving 3-D visualization performance for Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV).
As many in the Unidata community are aware, on January 14, 2015 the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) began producing Global Forecast System (GFS) model output with 0.25-degree resolution for use in weather forecasting operations. This output is now available to be added to the Unidata Internet Data Distribution (IDD) system's CONDUIT data stream. So where is it?
The National Flood Interoperability Experiment (NFIE) is a project sponsored by the National Weather Service, the University of Alabama, and the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUASHI) to help build a new high resolution, near real-time hydrologic simulation and forecasting model for the United States. The University of Alabama and the recently opened National Water Center (located on the Tuscaloosa campus of the University of Alabama) will be hosting a seven-week Summer Institute associated with the NFIE in June and July 2015.
A series of free webinars describing the NFIE program structure and the information and modeling sources available, as well as potential lines of research that could be pursued through the NFIE training program, are being held in the winter and spring of 2015. The next webinar will be held Wednesday, February 18th at 3:00 pm ET.
UCAR's Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research and Science (SOARS) program offers webinars on careers and grad school in the atmospheric and related sciences. The webinars are geared towards undergraduate students, grad students, and faculty who support students in career development.
At 2:00pm MST on February 12, 2015, the program will host a webinar titled "Career panel in the atmospheric sciences." The panel includes three atmospheric science graduates whose career paths have led to very different places — a weather anchorman from WKYC-TV3 in Cleveland, a research scientist at NCAR, and a manager at the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center at the University of Hawaii. Join the free webinar to hear about their jobs and career paths, and to ask them any questions you might have about careers in the atmospheric sciences.
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.
This year's annual American Meteorological Society meeting was held January 4-8 in Phoenix, Arizona. 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.
The iSamplES (Internet of Samples in the Earth Sciences) Research Coordination Network (RCN) is an EarthCube activity that seeks to advance the use of innovative cyberinfrastructure to connect physical samples and sample collections across the Earth Sciences with digital data infrastructures to revolutionize their utility for science. The ultimate goal of this RCN is to dramatically improve the discovery, access, sharing, analysis, and curation of physical samples and the data generated by their study for the benefit of science and society.
Unidata offers equipment grants to support a variety of projects
The Unidata Program Center is pleased to announce the opening of the 2015 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 2015, a total of $100,000 is available for awards; proposals for amounts up to $20,000 will be considered.
