Students! Are you looking to make the transition to Python but unsure of where to start? Do you already know Python but want to see atmospheric science specific applications? Are you looking for data? If so, then please join us for a hands-on AMS Student Conference Python Workshop where beginners and experts alike will learn skills that enhance their ability to find, analyze, and explore data. All the workshop resources will be in the cloud, so no specialized local software installations are necessary. All you need is a laptop or tablet (a keyboard may be helpful) and a GitHub ID to participate.

Members of the Unidata Program Center staff will be attending the 101st annual American Meteorology Society meeting, to be held virtually 9-15 January 2021. The schedule below lists sessions or posters presented by staff members. It also lists times when we'll be available to chat in our AMS Virtual Booth.

Note: while the larger UCAR organization has an official booth in the virtual exhibit hall, Unidata has chosen a system we think makes video chat interactions a little easier. We've set up a separate site that allows you to join us via the Airmeet virtual events platform. We hope you'll stop by with questions, or just to chat, during our exhibit hours.

Version 4.9.7 of the netCDF Operators (NCO) has been released. NCO is an Open Source package that consists of a dozen standalone, command-line programs that take netCDF files as input, then operate (e.g., derive new data, average, print, hyperslab, manipulate metadata) and output the results to screen or files in text, binary, or netCDF formats.

The NCO project is coordinated by Professor Charlie Zender of the Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine. More information about the project, along with binary and source downloads, are available on the SourceForge project page.

The Unidata THREDDS Development Team released version 5.4.1 of the netCDF-Java/Common Data Model (CDM) library on December 17th, 2020. The 5.4.1 release includes the first look at the public API, support for building with Java 11 - 14, and support for accessing data from object storage, such as AWS S3.

In the spring of 2020, Unidata made an offer of resources through the Science Gateway project in order to facilitate online learning in response to the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic. Since that time, nearly 440 users — mostly undergraduates in atmospheric science programs — have been able to take advantage of cloud-based resources to access pre-configured computational notebooks for learning and teaching objectives.

For the spring 2021 term, Unidata is once again offering to provide universities (or individual instructors) access to cloud-based JupyterHub servers tailored to the needs of university atmospheric science courses and workshops. By using the Unidata Science Gateway, instructors can add Jupyter notebooks used in their coursework to a dedicated JupyterHub hosted using Unidata’s resources in the NSF Jetstream cloud. Once logged in to the JupyterHub, individual students access pre-configured computing environments that allow them to work with the notebooks interactively, making and saving their own alterations to existing notebooks or creating their own new notebooks.