NCAR's Computational and Information Systems Laboratory invites NSF-supported university researchers in the atmospheric, oceanic, and related sciences to submit large allocation requests for the Yellowstone High Performance Computing system by September 15, 2014.

For the Yellowstone system, computational requests greater than 200,000 core-hours are considered "large." Smaller requests for up to 200,000 core-hours are accepted any time and are typically reviewed within two business days.

NOAA has announced that its Wind Profiler Network (NPN) will be decommissioned this year. NOAA's first step in this process will be to deactivate the NPN data feed to NWS websites and the Unidata IDD network. As a result, CONUS wind profiler data in the IDD FSL2 feed will also cease on or about August 30, 2014.

Read on for the text of the NOAA Profiler Network Service Change Notice announcing the removal of the data feed.

The National Weather Service is investigating ways to make greater amounts of data available to the geoscience community. Read on for additional information and ways to provide your feedback.

On Friday, March 28, 2014 the Unidata Program Center (UPC) updated the demonstration THREDDS Data Server (TDS) running on thredds.ucar.edu to version 4.5 of the TDS software. After encountering some issues with the updated version, including problems with community members' IDV bundles not loading as expected from thredds.ucar.edu, UPC staff reverted the demonstration server to version 4.3 on April 1st.

UPC staff had became aware that TDS version 4.3 running on thredds.ucar.edu was not keeping some dataset indices up to date automatically. This situation required manual intervention by UPC staff to keep the indices updated, which, coupled with changes in UPC security procedures following the intrusion on February 20, 2014, increased the urgency of releasing a new TDS version that fixed the problem. After internal testing convinced us that TDS version 4.5 was functioning properly, we followed the normal procedure of updating UPC servers (specifically thredds.ucar.edu) before releasing the package to other sites. This staged release process normally allows us to find and fix "real world" issues that are not caught by internal testing.

Shortly after 0 UTC (18:00 MDT) on Saturday, March 21, 2014, the contents of the Internet Data Distribution FNEXRAD (NEXRAD Level III national composites) and UNIWISC (aka McIDAS Satellite Imagery Sectors) datastreams were updated with new products. Prior to the update, the FNEXRAD products were created on motherlode.ucar.edu and the UNIWISC products were created on unidata2.ssec.wisc.edu. Both datastreams are now being created in a 64-bit CentOS 6.5 Virtual Machine in the Amazon EC2 cloud.

Read on for a brief overview of the contents of each datastream with special emphasis on new or altered products.

The Unidata Program Center has received notification that NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite GOES-12 (currently in the GOES-South position, formerly covering the GOES-East position) will be decommissioned on August 16, 2013.

Vaisala's National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN) began operation in 1983 as a regional network run by the State University of New York at Albany. Since then, the network has expanded to monitor cloud-to-ground lightning activity across the continental United States, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Unidata's Data Hallway

The Unidata Program Center is pleased to announce the completion today of its newest community service facility in Boulder, Colorado. The Unidata Data Hallway provides modern, efficient, 24/7 data services to the university community -- while also making a stylish interior design statement.

"It's great to have such a lavish facility for our 'big iron'," says Unidata Program Center systems administrator Mike Schmidt. "We were excited to be able to showcase our data-delivery infrastructure like this -- it really helps the public understand the level of technical sophistication involved in what we're doing here at Unidata."