Unidata community members Ivo Jimenez and Dr. Carlos Maltzahn from the University of California, Santa Cruz, along with Kevin Tyle from the University at Albany, will be presenting an AMS Short Course titled Reproducible Atmospheric Science Workflows Using Open Source Tools: An Introduction to the Popper Experimentation Protocol. The course focuses on an exciting new open-source toolset developed by researchers at UC Santa Cruz with specific tie-ins to reproducible workflows in atmospheric science modeling using the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF), both in research and the classroom.

Unidata developers Ryan May and John Leeman, together with Kevin Goebbert from Valparaiso University, will be teaching a one-day short course titled “Python for Dynamical Meteorology Using MetPy” at the 2018 AMS Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas. The format of the course is like that of our larger Python workshop, relying on Jupyter notebooks to teach several core concepts. The crux of the course is to access remote data sets and use MetPy to perform analyses relevant to synoptic/dynamic meteorology. The goal is to go beyond the traditional introduction to Python and work on some concrete, meteorology-specific problems. As a result, familiarity with Python, NumPy, and Matplotlib is assumed.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is accepting applications for the Director position at the Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC). The Space Science and Engineering Center is a dynamic, multidisciplinary research and development center in the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education. Its mission is to conduct atmospheric, oceanic, environmental and astronomical research using remote sensing from spaceborne, airborne, and surface-based platforms to discover and apply physical properties of the universe for the benefit of humanity.

Hurricane Irma

Will virtual reality become a useful tool for the atmospheric sciences? If you're attending the American Geophysical Union annual meeting (December 11-15, 2017 in New Orleans, LA), be sure to drop by the UCAR Community Programs booth in the exhibition hall for some virtual reality demonstrations showing both observational and forecast data from hurricane Irma, which barrelled through the Caribbean in September 2017.

Unidata staff members Ward Fisher and Jeff Weber have been working with scientists at the Geological Survey of the Netherlands to figure out how to use netCDF datasets in the Survey's virtual reality system. Together with software developers from the research organization TNO in the Netherlands, this group has put together a visualization of hurricane Irma that can be can be investigated and manipulated (i.e. thin sliced, filtered, scaled, etc.) in real-time by multiple users with HTC Vive devices.

The NetCDF-Java/Common Data Model (CDM) library and THREDDS Data Server (TDS) version 4.6.11 releases were finished on December 4th, 2017.