In case you missed it — here's a recap of news from the Unidata Program Center for the month of October, 2019.

Pete Pokrandt of the University of Wisconsin, Madison has been awarded the 2019 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.”

Pokrandt has been supporting the needs of geoscience data users at the University of Wisconsin and around the Unidata community since the 1990s; he served on the Unidata Users Committee from 2015 through 2018.

In case you missed it — here's a recap of news from the Unidata Program Center for the month of September, 2019.

The Unidata Program Center is pleased to welcome new members to the program's governing committees. Committee members serve three-year terms, meeting twice each year to provide feedback on the effectiveness of the Unidata Program and advise staff on issues facing the university community. Appointments reflect the range of large and small colleges and universities with undergraduate and graduate emphases where Unidata systems are in use.

Read on for 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.

In case you missed it — here's a recap of news from the Unidata Program Center for the month of August, 2019.

The Unidata Program Center's three summer student interns — Jessica Blunt from the University of Oklahoma, Max Grover from the University of Illinois, and Aodhan Sweeney from the University of Washington — 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 31, 2019. You can find videos of their presentations to the UPC staff on the Unidata Seminar Series page.

Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Indiana will be hosting a Unidata Regional Software Training Workshop August 12-13, 2019. Unidata software developers will be leading the two-day Python-focused workshop, which will cover the use of the MetPy and Siphon packages in the context of atmospheric science. A basic familiarity with Python is assumed — check out the Unidata Online Python Training site for a refresher.

Unidata holds regional workshops in part to facilitate easy access to software training for those who may not be able to travel to training workshops held at the Unidata Program Center in Boulder, Colorado. Attendance is explicitly not limited to Valparaiso students and staff; we encourage those within easy travel distance to consider attending.

Note: The deadline for nominations for Unidata committee appointments beginning in the fall of 2019 has been extended until July 7, 2019.

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. Direct involvement in the Program by the academic community helps Unidata stay on top of trends in education and research; for example, recent initiatives on Python and cloud-based computing have benefitted tremendously from committee advice and involvement.

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 Sepideh Yalda, the current Chair of the Unidata Strategic Advisory Committee notes, “Unidata has and continues to serve a critical role in providing data and services to the earth and related sciences community. The opportunity to serve as a member on Unidata governance committees provides you with the ability to contribute and help guide the future developments in data sharing and the associated services in support of research and education in atmospheric sciences.”

Whether you like your weather data local, pushed to you by the Unidata Local Data Manager (LDM) through the Internet Data Distribution (IDD) project, or stored remotely and accessed on demand as needed, the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Wisconsin – Madison (UW-AOS) has you covered.

The UW-AOS Department has been helping to make weather data available to the Unidata community since the early days of the IDD project. An upgraded ingest and relay cluster, made possible by funding from the 2018 Unidata Equipment Awards grant program, has now enabled UW-AOS to serve the GOES16 and GOES17 data along with everything else to additional downstream sites.