Ryan May joined the Unidata Program Center software development staff on January 6th, 2013. He comes to Unidata from the University of Oklahoma, where he completed his bachelor's and master's degrees in Meteorology, and where he'll be finishing up his doctoral dissertation “sometime later this year.”
As an atmospheric scientist, Ryan comes to the Program Center with not only experience using Unidata technologies but also an appreciation for the ways the program benefits the geosciences community. He came to work at the Program Center for “the chance to help do software development for the benefit of the whole community — and to work on some really interesting and useful projects like THREDDS and netCDF.”
Ryan's initial focus at Unidata will be contributing to the related THREDDS Data Server and NetCDF-Java/Common Data Model projects. But once he's fully up to speed with the THREDDS group, he hopes to find time for some side projects.
As part of his doctoral research, Ryan has been working on a software simulator to test algorithms used with data from dual-polarization radar sites — and also to be used in a classroom setting to help visualize fundamental radar concepts. Since the National Weather Service just finished upgrading its network of Doppler radar installations to dual-pol in the Spring of 2013, his work in this area is certainly timely.
Much of the radar simulator is written in the Python programming language, for which Ryan sees great potential in the geoscience community. At the UPC, one of his early projects is to investigate ways to improve support for netCDF in Python. “I'd like to help make Unidata technologies more easily available to the growing Python community in in the atmosphetic sciences,” he says. Working with other open source projects in the Python and netCDF communities to ensure access to the full range of netCDF-4 features via Python code is high on Ryan's list.
But to those of you out there in the Unidata community who are just as eager as Ryan to see these things implemented, go easy on him for a while. Let's give him a chance to get that dissertation finished up.
Please join us in welcoming Ryan to the Unidata Program Center!
