The 100th American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting in will be held 12–16 January 2020 in Boston, MA. The submission deadline for abstracts is 1 August 2019.

See the Call for Papers for details.

The American Geophysical Union continues to celebrate its centennial as well. The 2019 Fall Meeting in will be held 9-13 December 2019 in San Francisco, CA. The submission deadline for abstracts is 31 July 2019.

See the Fall Meeting website for details.

The Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) version 5.6 is now available. This is a major release with new features including an isentropic advection derived parameter, a 3D streamline display, new display types for the 3D grid tracer display, and a chooser for Geostationary Lightning Mapper data from ADDE servers. In addition, the release includes updates to existing features and incorporates the latest netCDF-Java library.

The Unidata Program receives the majority of its funding from the National Science Foundation. Every five years, the program submits a new proposal to the NSF, outlining past accomplishments and describing plans for future activities.

As Unidata entered the final year of the most recent NSF proposal period, which ended on March 31, 2019, Program Center staff and members of Unidata's governing committees engaged in countless conversations about the future direction of the program. The impact of existing programs, requests from community members for new or augmented services, and prognostications about the future needs of the geoscience educators and researchers all figured into the discussions. The resulting proposal, titled Unidata: Next-generation Data Services and Workflows to Advance Geoscience Research and Education, was awarded by NSF with an official start date of May 1, 2019.

The Unidata Program Center will be altering the IDD NIMAGE datastream to contain all of the GOES-16 and GOES-17 Level 2 image products that are currently being being sent in the IDD NOTHER and HDS datastreams.

We plan to begin distributing a reconstituted NIMAGE feed from our top level IDD relay clusters (idd.unidata.ucar.edu and iddb.unidata.ucar.edu) in the mid-June time frame.

NetCDF has historically offered two different storage formats for the netCDF data model: files based on the original netCDF binary format, and files based on the HDF5 format. While this has proven effective in the past for traditional disk storage, it is less efficient for modern cloud-focused technologies such as those provided by Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud Object Storage, and other cloud service providers. To that end, the Unidata development team is happy to announce that we are expanding the storage solutions available through the netCDF software libraries.