The Unidata Program Center is partnering with UCAR's COSMIC program to provide radio occultation data provided by Spire Global. The products described below are now available via the Internet Data Distribution (IDD) network. Data are on the EXP feed with a typical total volume of 80-110 MB per hour.

Everyone loves to talk about the weather. But until now, serious collectors of weather memorabilia have been left on the sidelines. Oh, a lucky few manage to save enormous hailstones in their freezers, but most are limited to screen shots of satellite or radar imagery, or maybe articles clipped from the local newspaper.

But never fear: Unidata is preparing to bring weather collectibles into the twenty-first century by minting a series of Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) based on significant weather events. Our inaugural series will consist of 902 distinct NFTs of Hurricane Katrina, one for each millibar of the storm's lowest recorded atmospheric pressure.

The Unidata program and the University of Wisconsin–Madison's Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) have a long history of collaboration and cooperation to serve the needs of Unidata community members. The SSEC Satellite Data Services(SDS) group, which provides access to and distribution of real-time and archive weather satellite data, makes limited amounts of archive satellite data available to Unidata's academic community members at no cost via the “Multi-format Client-agnostic File Extraction Through Contextual HTTP” (MCFETCH) system.

The Committee on Data (CODATA) of the Paris-based International Science Council promotes open data policies, working to advance the interoperability and usability of research data. The Committee is committed to supporting FAIR data principles to improve the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets.

Within the CODATA organizational umbrella, Unidata software developer Steven Emmerson has joined the Digital Representation of Units of Measure (DRUM) Task Group, which aims to raise the profile of the digital representation of units of measure in research communities, representative and governing bodies, and with funders. DRUM takes the position that support for consistent digital representations of units of measurement is of far-reaching importance for science, technology, industry, and trade.

A container ship blocking the Suez Canal

For 6 days, 3 hours, and 38 minutes in late March, the Golden-class container ship Ever Given blocked the Suez canal, leaving more than 400 vessels piled up on either end of the canal as they waited for the stranded container ship to be refloated. While media coverage of the incident has focused on potential shortages of goods like petroleum, food, and bathroom tissue, little attention was paid to the potential for worldwide data shortages as a result of the reduction in shipping capacity.