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This year's annual American Meteorological Society meeting was held January 4-8 in Phoenix, Arizona. We were happy to see many of the Unidata community members participating in the meeting at our booth in the exhibit hall, and to meet so many prospective community members at the AMS Student Conference.
With so much going on at the conference, we can't cover everything here. Instead, we present some highlights as recalled by UPC staff members who attended.
14th Student Conference
The 14th AMS Student Conference had 620 attendees. As in recent years, Unidata had a table set up for the Student Conference Career Fair, held Saturday and Sunday evenings before the main conference opened on Monday. Unidata's table attracted many visitors, with students interested in data and software available from Unidata as well as Unidata's Summer Internship program. (If you're interested, there is still time to apply.)
Continued AWIPS II Interest
AWIPS II, the next-generation weather visualization and forecasting software developed by the National Weather Service, continues to gain traction in academic, research, and commercial organizations. Unidata works with the NWS and the National Centers For Environmental Prediction to bring a version of AWIPS II to universities, which don't have the same resources or requirements as the operational Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs) for which the system was designed. Unidata's version, which is currently being beta tested by several universities, offers research and education organizations the ability to run the system without requiring them to install the complex hardware configuration used in the WFOs' operational setting.
IDV Demonstrations
As always, Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) was a big draw at the AMS conference booth. And while there is always someone on hand from the UPC to show off the IDV's capabilities, it's always nice to have community members stop by with some of their own data to show. This year, Brendan Hoch of Plymouth State University in New Hampshire (and former member of the Unidata Users Committee) showed off some of the graphics his program generates using the IDV and publishes on the university web site. If you're generating cool imagery with the IDV, bring it by the Unidata booth next year and let us show it on the big screen!
Python Symposium
The Symposium on Advances in Modeling and Analysis Using Python, now in its fifth year at the AMS annual meeting, was once again very well attended. UPC staff continue to explore ways to make Unidata technologies easier to integrate into scientific workflows built around Python, and were glad to participate in this year's symposium as attendees and speakers.
Other Unidata Presentations
Unidata Program Center staff also participated in several papers and posters presented at the conference:
- Mohan Ramamurthy co-chaired a session on Open Data Standards and Sharing
- Ward Fisher gave a poster on Accessing NetCDF4 Data in Python
- Jeff Weber had a poster on A New Approach to Sharing Curriculum and Data
- Ryan May and Sean Arms spoke on Exploring Client-Server Data Visualization using IPython and WebGL
- Yuan Ho and Julien Chastang spoke on Using Progressive Resolution to Visualize large Satellite Image dataset
- Jeff Weber gave a presentation on Typhoon Haiyan
- Michael James presented AWIPS II for the University Community: Unidata Program Center Update
- Sean Arms spoke at the New Ideas Forum: Networking and Idea Exchange for Student and Early Career Members
- Jeff Weber joined Embry Riddle University's Curtis James to speak on A Cloud-Based Mobile Weather Server to Support Emergency Response Meteorology Training and Operations
- Mohan Ramamurty co-chaired a session on Data Stewardship: Ensuring the Value of Data from Real-Time to Posterity
As always, the Unidata staff came away from the AMS annual meeting impressed by the camaraderie and fascinating research being done by Unidata community members and the geoscience community at large. We were also pleasantly surprised by the frequency with which we heard references to Unidata or our services while attending talks across AMS domains. If you've got a story to tell about how you're using Unidata software, data, or services that you think might help others advance their own research, drop us a note and let us help you spread the word.
