In case you missed it — here's a recap of news from the Unidata Program Center for the month of March, 2015.

Students at Colorado State University

The Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University (CSU) has a long history of research and education in all aspects of the atmospheric sciences. Faculty, students, and staff use a wide variety of datasets in their research and teaching, from numerical models to gridded reanalyses to radar and satellite observations to measurements collected in the field and lab. However, the students in the department recognized issues that were preventing these large datasets from being used to their full potential.

With a grant from the Unidata Community Equipment Awards program, along with a grant from the College of Engineering, the CSU Department of Atmospheric Science acquired a data storage server that makes many of these data sources readily and easily accessible to students.

Note to the Unidata community: Space at this Regional Workshop is still available, but register soon!

The University of South Florida, the Florida Institute of Technology, and the West Central Florida Chapter of the American Meteorological Society are pleased to sponsor and host a Unidata Regional Workshop on April 10-12, 2015 (Friday through Sunday). Unidata Program Center staff will provide introductory and advanced training in the use of Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV), the Repository for Archiving, Managing and Accessing Diverse Data (RAMADDA), and other Unidata data and tools. In addition to the formal training sessions, there will be informal opportunities to interact with the UPC staff. Attendees are encouraged to "bring" their own data (preferably accessible from a remote access server) for exploration during the workshop.

In case you missed it — here's a recap of news from the Unidata Program Center for the month of February, 2015.

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).

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.

In case you missed it — here's a recap of news from the Unidata Program Center for the month of January, 2015.