This year's annual American Meteorological Society meeting was held 12-16 January 2025 in New Orleans, LA. Several NSF Unidata staff members were able to travel to New Orleans to visit with students, present papers and posters, and otherwise take part in the conference. As always, staff members spent some time meeting with community members at UCAR's exhibit hall booth. The following are some of the conference highlights from the perspective of NSF Unidata staff.
24th Student Conference
As we try to do at every AMS Annual Meeting, NSF Unidata had a table set up for the Student Conference Career Fair, held Saturday and Sunday evenings before the main conference exhibition hall opened. Our table attracted many visitors, with students interested in data and software available from NSF Unidata as well as our Summer Internship program.
In addition to talking with students at the Career Fair, NSF Unidata staff members Drew Camron and Thomas Martin also helped out at the Student Conference, tossing around ideas and providing feedback about open science and best practices.
And speaking of students, both of our summer 2024 student interns were at AMS this year: Ana Castaneda Montoya had posters both during the Student Conference and the Languages of Open Sciences poster sessions, and Leo Matak presented a paper on Improving Urban Parameterizations in Numerical Weather Models and Their Impacts on Meteorological and Air Quality Forecasts during the Physics and Dynamics Development section.
AI/ML in Focus
NSF Unidata developer Thomas Martin, who focuses his efforts on finding ways to help our community benefit from artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) technologies, found a number of talks and presentations that caught his interest. He especially appreciated the panel discussion about the future of AI-NWP (AI numerical weather prediction). His take is that these efforts by the private sector, startups, and some government agencies will only accelerate.
Thomas also appreciated a talk by Amy McGovern of the NSF AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography Univ. of Oklahoma (AI2ES) introducing Extreme WeatherBench (EWB). EWB provides a community-curated benchmark of high-impact weather events. He says EWB and similar tools for scoring extreme events for AI models “is a great development for our community. Right now our current metrics do not capture impacts well.” In a similar vein, Thomas highlighted a paper by a team at Colorado State University, An Investigation of Metrics to Evaluate the Sharpness in AI-Generated Meteorological Imagery as raising an interesting question, namely “do we want accurate or sharp imagery from our AI models?”
NSF Unidata Software Tools at the Conference
This year, NSF Unidata software developer Tiffany Meyer co-chaired the AWIPS System Updates section. In addition to her duties as an organizer, she presented an update on the Program Center's continuing efforts to modify and redistribute the National Weather Service's Advanced Weather Information Processing System (AWIPS) package for use outside of NWS forecasting operations, with a focus on meeting the needs of the University community.
The NSF Unidata MetPy team was also on hand, with MetPy developer and NSF Unidata deputy director Ryan May presenting on MetPy Development and On-Going Plans, including a description of the upcoming MetPy 1.7 release. NSF Unidata MetPy developer Drew Camron was also on hand, along with numerous community contributors to the MetPy package.
NSF Unidata Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) developer Yuan Ho presented on work he's done with colleague Yan Sun from Mississippi State University, describing Interdisciplinary IDV, which combines scientific visualization and mathematical modeling to improve the understanding of weather data.
The NSF Unidata Science Gateway made an appearance during the talks as well, with developer Julien Chastang describing work he and developer Ana Espinoza have done at the Program Center. Julien's talk highlighted two case studies that demonstrate the practical applications of the Science Gateway's advanced computational tools. In addition, the Science Gateway team assisted the LROSE project in transitioning to use their own Jetstream2 resources during their AMS workshop. In the past, the NSF Unidata team has supported LROSE with Science Gateway resources during the conference, and it's great to see their complete workflow — from data generation with LROSE utilities to analysis, visualization, and interpretation — now in their own hands.
Visiting with Community
In addition to interacting with community members at talks and poster sessions, Unidata staff members spent time at the UCAR/NCAR booth in the AMS exhibit hall. While Unidata's presence at the booth was low-key, we were happy to talk with students and others who came by to learn about internships, software, and data access.
What do you think of this arrangement? Were you able to find us in the AMS exhibition space? Did you get to talk with Unidata staff members you wanted to contact? We'd love to hear your thoughts on how we can best visit with you at AMS 2026! Drop us a line at support@unidata.ucar.edu if you'd like to weigh in.
