In case you missed it — here's a recap of news from the NSF Unidata Program Center for the month of February, 2025.
Upcoming deadlines to be aware of:
| 28 March | Applications for the NSF Unidata 2025 Community Equipment Awards program are due. |
| 28 March | Nominations for the NSF Unidata 2025 Russell L. DeSouza Award are due. |
Highlights from last month:
Are We Preparing Earth Systems Science Practitioners for the Future?
If you provide Earth Systems Science learning opportunities at the post-secondary levels or within the workforce, UCAR needs your input! UCAR would love to hear about any learning opportunities that you offer on emerging ESS capabilities — ranging from AI/ML and data management to relationship building, creativity, and more — that are needed in the workplace now and in the future.
Book Review - StatQuest Guide to Neural Networks
According to reviewer Thomas Martin, The StatQuest Illustrated Guide to Neural Networks and AI: With hands-on examples in PyTorch!!! strikes an excellent balance between accessibility and technical depth. Josh Starmer, PhD, builds on his previous work while making neural networks approachable for both students and practitioners.
NetCDF operators (NCO) version 5.3.2
Version 5.3.2 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.
FireWxPy: A Python Package For Fire Weather Analysis And Forecasting
FireWxPy is a user friendly, open source Python package to create visualizations of data specific to fire weather and fire weather forecasting, created by Eric J. Drewitz. The package is built to support a wide range of fire weather-focused visualizations for any state or GACC Region.
AMS 2025 Conference Highlights from the NSF Unidata Staff
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. Read on for some of the conference highlights from the perspective of NSF Unidata staff.
Python-AWIPS Release v23.1
We are happy to announce a new version of python-awips (v23.1) is available! This version is available via source code (with all example notebooks) or via mamba (conda) and pip. Please see our main documentation page for installation instructions.
On the Developer's Blog
NSF Unidata Program Center developers write regularly on technical topics on the Unidata Developer's Blog. The ongoing MetPy Mondays works some examples of using the Windrose package.
Governing Committee News
NSF Unidata's Users Committee met in a joint session with the Strategic Advisory Committee September 25-28, 2024. The Users Committee will meet next in April of 2025.
NSF Unidata's Strategic Advisory Committee met in a joint session with the Users Committee September 25-28, 2024. The Strategic Advisory Committee will meet next in April of 2025.
