NCAR's Computational & Information Systems Laboratory released version 6.3.0 of the NCAR Command Language (NCL) on March 18, 2015.

NCL is a free interpreted language designed specifically for scientific data processing and visualization. It is a self-contained, array-based scripting language developed in close collaboration with scientists at NCAR and an active international user community that is specialized for analyzing and visualizing geoscientific data. It provides robust file input and output for a variety of commonly used scientific formats, including various flavors of NetCDF, HDF, GRIB, and shapefiles. NCL also contains hundreds of analysis functions and enables the creation of high quality custom-tailored 2D visualizations.

For more information about this release, including download instructions, see What's new in the current release

Students at Colorado State University

The Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University (CSU) has a long history of research and education in all aspects of the atmospheric sciences. Faculty, students, and staff use a wide variety of datasets in their research and teaching, from numerical models to gridded reanalyses to radar and satellite observations to measurements collected in the field and lab. However, the students in the department recognized issues that were preventing these large datasets from being used to their full potential.

With a grant from the Unidata Community Equipment Awards program, along with a grant from the College of Engineering, the CSU Department of Atmospheric Science acquired a data storage server that makes many of these data sources readily and easily accessible to students.

Note to the Unidata community: Space at this Regional Workshop is still available, but register soon!

The University of South Florida, the Florida Institute of Technology, and the West Central Florida Chapter of the American Meteorological Society are pleased to sponsor and host a Unidata Regional Workshop on April 10-12, 2015 (Friday through Sunday). Unidata Program Center staff will provide introductory and advanced training in the use of Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV), the Repository for Archiving, Managing and Accessing Diverse Data (RAMADDA), and other Unidata data and tools. In addition to the formal training sessions, there will be informal opportunities to interact with the UPC staff. Attendees are encouraged to “bring” their own data (preferably accessible from a remote access server) for exploration during the workshop.

In case you missed it — here's a recap of news from the Unidata Program Center for the month of February, 2015.