This year's annual American Meteorological Society meeting in Austin, Texas hosted more than 3400 attendees — more than the 2012 meeting — despite the fact that many government employees were unable to attend due to uncertainties about the federal budget. We were happy to see many of the Unidata community members participating in the meeting at our booth in the exhibit hall, and to meet so many prospective community members at the AMS Student Conference.
With so much going on at the conference, we can't cover everything here. Instead, we present some highlights as recalled by UPC staff members who attended.
12th Student Conference
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The 12th AMS Student Conference had 639 registered attendees — an all-time record. "We had more traffic at our table during this year's Student Career Fair than the previous two years," said Unidata Director Mohan Ramamurthy. "There is lots of student interest in working at Unidata as interns and in the use of our software."
UPC Staffer Tina Campbell also noted a lot of student interest in the Summer Graduate Student Intern program. "The fact that a lot of students visiting our table were undergrads reduced our applicant pool," said Campbell. "We did tell many to go ahead and apply anyway."
Demonstrations of AWIPS II
AWIPS II is the National Weather Service's next generation weather forecasting, display and analysis package. While AWIPS II is still in development, many conference sessions were devoted to its status, design, and underlying software architecture.
"Judging by the presentations made at the conference," said Ramamurty, "AWIPS II development and deployment are progressing well. Groups are working on AWIPS II plug-ins for OPeNDAP, NOMADS and MADIS."
The UPC's Michael James not only presented some recent Unidata work during the AWIPS II System Update sessions, he had the current version of AWIPS II running in the Unidata booth in the AMS exhibition hall.
Lots of interest in the IDV
Unidata's own Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) was also on display, both at the Student Conference and in Unidata's booth. Visitors new to the IDV were impressed with its 3D capabilities, while current users stopped by to learn about recently-added features like time-matching displays and new ensemble model analysis capabilities.
IDV developer Julien Chastang also presented the IDV news as part of the "Emerging technologies for research and operational Interactive Processing Systems" conference session. IDV developer Sean Arms gave a presentation on the use of the IDV and RAMADDA in the "Technology for Education" sesson.
Python Gains Ground
Python is emerging as a mainstream language in the geosciences. There were numerous Python-related tutorials and sessions or talks throughout the week.
"I participated in the two day short course, Intermediate Python: Using NumPy, SciPy and Matplotlib," says Chastang. "The class was taught by Dr. Alex DeCaria from Millersville University. Even though I had little exposure to Python, the instructor quickly familiarized us with the core concepts of the language. Moreover, I was impressed by the maturity of Python APIs for geoscience analysis and visualization. Since partaking in the class, I have experimented with the code samples, and can take advantage of Python to do real work (e.g., analyze netCDF files in the Python interactive shell)."
"I also attended several talks from the AMS Python Symposium," Chastang continues. "It was interesting being at a science conference and listening to presenters talk about open source development, Python, and Github. It almost felt like a software conference."
Other Unidata Presentations
Unidata Program Center staff gave several other talks during the conference:
- Sean Arms reported on an exploratory project to create a web-based tool for translating unstructured data from dataloggers into standard formats.
- Ethan Davis (standing in for John Caron) gave a talk on the suitability of BUFR and GRIB for archiving data.
- Russ Rew talked about making earth science data more accessible using compression and chunking.
- Jeff Weber presented research on thermodynamic and wind observations during the June 2012 Derecho passage.
Additionally, Unidata Program Center Director Mohan Ramamurthy co-chaired a town-hall session titled "Data Stewardship: Technological Approaches and Solutions to Collecting, Preserving, Communicating Weather and Climate Data" (see slides).
"There was a lively discussion on a range of issues (see slide 8)," says Ramamurthy, "but the most sensitive issue surrounds free and full access to data, especially those from the private sector and international communities."
