In case you missed it — here's a recap of news from the Unidata Program Center for the month of June, 2014.
NWS Requests Input on Open Environmental Information Services
In a 2011 whitepaper titled Towards Open Weather and Climate Services, the Environmental Information Services Working Group (EISWG) of the NOAA Science Advisory Board proposed that the National Weather Service begin working toward an “Open Weather and Climate Services” (later re-envisioned as Open Environmental Information Services, or OpenEIS) paradigm. The working group identified the expansion of access to data collected and created by the NWS as one of the principal benefits of the OpenEIS approach.
Read on for additional information and ways to provide your feedback.
Unidata Committee Nominations Open
The Unidata Program Center is seeking new people to serve on Unidata's Strategic Advisory and Users Committees. This is your chance to make a difference on behalf of the Unidata community. As William Gallus, the current Chair of the Unidata Strategic Advisory Committee notes, “Serving as a member of these committees puts you in the driver's seat to help shape the future of Unidata and thus the future of real time weather data delivery and the means to work with it.”
Nominations are open until July 18, 2014 for committee terms beginning with the September and October 2014 committee meetings. There will be several openings on each committee. Why not consider nominating one of your colleagues (or yourself!) to serve a three-year term, beginning in the fall of 2014?
New IDV Tutorial Videos: Adaptive Resolution and More
Three new screencasts related to the IDV have been posted to the Unidata YouTube channel in the past month. Two are contributions from members of the IDV user community, and one was created by Unidata Program Center staff to explain several features of the newly released IDV version 5.0.
NASA Launches Earth Science Challenges with OpenNEX Cloud Data
The NASA Earth Exchange (NEX), in collaboration with Amazon Web Services Inc. and Innocentive, had announced the OpenNEX challenge and workshop. They invite the general public, climate scientists, software engineers, and data analysts to design and implement concepts that enable climate resilience. There will be $60,000 in prize money available for participants as a reward for their innovations.
On the Developer's Blog
Unidata Program Center developers write regularly on technical topics on the Unidata Developer's Blog. Recent articles have dealt with using Python to create CF-compliant netCDF files, AWIPS II, GEMPAK, and netCDF compression.
Governing Committee News
Unidata's Users Committee met March 31-April 1 2014. The meeting summary is available here. The next meeting will be 15-16 September 2014 in Boulder, Colorado.
Unidata's Strategic Advisory Committee (formerly the Policy Committee) met May 20-21, 2014. The meeting summary is available here. The next meeting will be October 8-9, 2014.
