In case you missed it — here's a recap of news from the Unidata Program Center for the month of February, 2015.
2015 DeSouza Award Nominations
Do you know someone in the Unidata community who has been actively involved and helpful to you and other Unidata members? Perhaps this is someone who volunteers to assist others, contributes software, or makes suggestions that are generally useful for the community.
The Unidata Users Committee invites you to submit nominations for the Russell L. DeSouza Award for Outstanding Community Service. This Community Service Award honors individuals whose energy, expertise, and active involvement enable the Unidata Program to better serve the geosciences. Honorees personify Unidata's ideal of a community that shares ideas, data, and software through computing and networking technologies.
HIWPP Announces Open Data Initiative
The High Impact Weather Prediction Project (HIWPP) is a collaboration between a dozen or more organizations led by the NOAA Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) and the OAR/Office of Weather and Air Quality. Funded as part of the Hurricane Sandy Disaster Relief Supplemental Appropriations, the project aims to improve near term (from “now” to several weeks or months in the future) prediction of dangerous weather events including hurricanes, floods, and blizzards.
The HIWPP project team announced its Open Data Initiative on February 9, 2015. The goal of the initiative is to strengthen relationships between public, private, academic, and user communities within the weather enterprise. To achieve this, HIWPP will share output from models in advanced stages of development and invite feedback to model developers from the broader weather enterprise.
National Flood Interoperability Experiment Webinar Series
The National Flood Interoperability Experiment (NFIE) is a project sponsored by the National Weather Service, the University of Alabama, and the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUASHI) to help build a new high resolution, near real-time hydrologic simulation and forecasting model for the United States. The University of Alabama and the recently opened National Water Center (located on the Tuscaloosa campus of the University of Alabama) will be hosting a seven-week Summer Institute associated with the NFIE in June and July 2015.
A series of free webinars describing the NFIE program structure and the information and modeling sources available, as well as potential lines of research that could be pursued through the NFIE training program, are being held in the winter and spring of 2015.
Where is the GFS 0.25-degree Model Output?
As many in the Unidata community are aware, on January 14, 2015 the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) began producing Global Forecast System (GFS) model output with 0.25-degree resolution for use in weather forecasting operations. This output is now available to be added to the Unidata Internet Data Distribution (IDD) system's CONDUIT data stream. So where is it?
Site Visit: Metropolitan State University of Denver
On February 5, 2014, three Unidata Program Center staff members paid a visit to Professor Sam Ng and his collaborator Chris Kimmett at Metropolitan State University of Denver. We had the opportunity to sit in on Professor Ng's “Weather Analysis Techniques” course for undergraduate meteorology majors in the MSU department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
NetCDF operators (NCO) version 4.4.8
Version 4.4.8 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.
NetCDF Version 4.3.3.1
Version 4.3.3.1 of the NetCDF-C library is now available. (Version 4.3.3 was released a couple of weeks ago, but due to the immediate discovery of a bug, it was not announced.)
On the Developer's Blog
Unidata Program Center developers write regularly on technical topics on the Unidata Developer's Blog. Numerous recent articles by John Caron have dealt with converting GRIB files to netCDF-4 format.
Governing Committee News
Unidata's Users Committee met September 15-16, 2014, in Boulder, Colorado. The meeting summary is available here. The next meeting will be held 26-27 March, 2015 at the Unidata Program Center.
Unidata's Strategic Advisory Committee (formerly the Policy Committee) met October 8-9, 2014 in Boulder, Colorado. The meeting summary is available here. The next meeting will be held 22-23 April, 2015 at Millersville University.
