Alex Haberlie joined the Unidata Program Center team as a software development summer intern on May 23rd, 2016. Alex is working on his PhD at Northern Illinois University, writing a dissertation on the climatology of mesoscale convective systems. Prior to beginning his dissertation, Alex earned his Masters, also at Northern Illinois University, in Geography with an emphasis in meteorology and his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from University of Wisconsin, Platteville.
The Unidata Summer Internships offer undergraduate and graduate students an opportunity to work with Unidata software engineers and scientists on projects drawn from a wide variety of areas in the atmospheric and computational sciences.
Alex's overall interests are in applied climatology and meteorology, and how large geospatial datasets can help us answer questions in those fields. His primary task while interning at Unidata will be to add GIS functionality to MetPy. GIS functionality will improve the accuracy of the mapping capabilities already in place within the software.
“As a regular user of several Python packages, I am very grateful for all of the hard work that is put into developing, testing, and maintaining those projects,” says Alex. “This internship is a great opportunity to pay it forward and work with some of the leaders in the open source community in meteorology.”
In addition to assisting with MetPy development, Alex hopes to explore the hiking trails around Boulder, occasionally storm chase, and possibly revive the NCAR golf team.
Please join us in welcoming Alex to the Program Center for the summer!
