The Balearic Islands Coastal Ocean Observing and Forecasting System (SOCIB), is a multi-platform Marine Research Infrastructure located in the Mediterranean Sea. A joint initiative between the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación) and the Balearic Islands Government (Govern de les Illes Balears), SOCIB provides free, open and quality-controlled data from nearshore to the open sea.

News of this innovative use of THREDDS and other Unidata technologies in the Balearic Islands Coastal Ocean Observing and Forecasting System (SOCIB) came to us as a result of UPC staff participation at the Ocean Data Interoperability Platform (ODIP) conference earlier this year.

Rich Signell

Richard Signell of the United States Geological Survey has been awarded the 2014 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."

Dr. Signell is a research oceanographer at the US Geological Survey in Woods Hole, MA. He has been a tireless proponent of Unidata software tools for more than twenty years; in 1992 he co-authored a paper titled "NetCDF: A Public-Domain-Software Solution to Data-Access Problems for Numerical Modelers" for a conference of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Dr. Robert Hetland of Texas A&M University, who nominated Signell for the award, says "I believe that the general adoption of netCDF as the standard way to store numerical ocean model information is due to Rich's early efforts to promote netCDF."

In case you missed it — here's a recap of news from the Unidata Program Center for the month of August, 2014.

The Unidata Program Center is pleased to welcome 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 one member of the Strategic Advisory committee. New members and those finishing their terms will overlap for one meeting, which will take place in September (Users Committee) and October (Strategic Advisory Committee) of 2014.

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 this fall.

Read on for a brief introduction to the scientists joining Unidata's committees.

In case you missed it — here's a recap of news from the Unidata Program Center for the month of July, 2014.

The Unidata Seminar Series presents a talk by Dr. Stefano Nativi of the National Research Council of Italy (IIA-CNR, Florence Division). The talk, titled GEOSS Common Infrastructure and the Brokering Framework, will describe progress on using service brokering techniques in a federated multidisciplinary data environment as part of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems.

In case you missed it — here's a recap of news from the Unidata Program Center for the month of June, 2014.

Unidata Users and Strategic Advisory Committees

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."

In case you missed it — here's a recap of news from the Unidata Program Center for the month of May, 2014.

The Unidata Program Center is pleased to announce its 2014 Software Training Workshop. The workshop features Unidata's display and analysis packages GEMPAK (with an introduction to AWIPS-II) and the IDV, as well as data access and management tools including the Local Data Manager (LDM) and the THREDDS Data Server (TDS). This year's workshop will also include a session on using the Python programming language with Unidata technologies.