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 NASA Earth Exchange (NEX), in collaboration with Amazon Web Services Inc. and Innocentive, had announced the OpenNEX challenge and workshop. They invite the general public, climate scientists, software engineers, and data analysts to design and implement concepts that enable climate resilience. There will be $60,000 in prize money available for participants as a reward for their innovations.

The first stage of the challenge runs July 1 through August 1, 2014, and offers as much as $10,000 in awards for ideas on novel uses of the large collection of climate and Earth science satellite data sets — including global land surface images, vegetation conditions, climate observations, and climate projections — that are being made available to participants. The second stage, beginning in August, will offer between $30,000 and $50,000 in awards for the development of an application or algorithm that promotes climate resilience using the OpenNEX data, based on ideas from the first stage of the challenge. NASA will announce the overall challenge winners in December.

Read more in NASA's news release and on the OpenNEX web site.

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.