The American Meteorological Society's Summer community meeting will be taking place August 8-11, 2011 in Boulder, Colorado. The meeting's theme is "Building a Stronger Weather and Climate Enterprise — Keeping the Economy Moving." Unidata's Linda Miller will be attending and presenting "Towards Open Weather and Climate Services: A Unidata Academic Perspective" during the NOAA Environmental Information Services Working Group session.

The Unidata Program Center will be moving into the Anthes building.

The Unidata Program Center has spiffy new lodgings.

Update: Our move to the new building is (more or less) complete. Come by and visit us in our snazzy (if temporary) new building.

It's only temporary, and it's only across the street, but the Program Center offices (along with the offices of most of the programs that make up the UCAR Community Programs — UCP) will be moving to new digs during the week of August 8, 2011. As a result, we may be slow to respond to phone calls and e-mail support questions during the transition. If all goes according to plan, we'll be in the new space beginning on Monday, August 15th.

Unidata's Jeff Weber is comfortable making scientific ideas easy for nonscientists to understand — he's one of the NCAR Science Wizards who make learning about the world fun for kids (and adults) during NCAR's annual Super Science Saturday events in Boulder, Colorado. Weber got another chance to explain an interesting phenomenon — the almost-daily lightning displays Coloradans have been seeing this July — to an even bigger audience when a local television meteorologist came to chat.

The Unidata Users Committee.

Unidata is governed by its community. Our governing committees facilitate consensus building for future directions for the Unidata Program and establish standards of involvement for the community.

This fall, we are seeking new people to serve on Unidata's Policy and Users Committees. This is your chance to make a difference on behalf of the Unidata community. As Steven Businger, the current Chair of the Unidata Policy Committee states, "Over time, these two governing committees have provided important guidance in setting goals, accomplishing objectives, and helping to set future directions for the program."

Unidata is happy to announce the Community Equipment Award recipients for 2011. Eight institutions received funding this year:

• New Mexico State University
• Pennsylvania State University
• Rutgers University
• San Jose State University
• Texas A&M University
• University of Colorado / CIRES
• University of Salento & CMCC, Italy
• University of South Florida

In the spring of 2010, the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences (DAES) at the University at Albany, State University of New York received funds from Unidata's annual Community Equipment Awards program to renovate the department's electronic map room. As a result, during the summer of 2010 our department purchased eight Dell Optiplex 780 desktop computers with dual-quad core CPUs (thus eight CPUs are available per unit) and eight GB of RAM.  The machines were received too late in the summer to be ready for the fall semester, but were in place for the start of the second semester in January, 2011. Seven of the systems sit in the DAES electronic maproom, while the eighth resides in the Principal Investigator's office, for use as a development machine as well as an emergency hot spare.