The Unidata Program Center is happy to be hosting summer intern Josh Clark. Josh graduated from the University of Northern Colorado (UNC) in the spring of 2015 with a B.S. in Meteorology, and is headed to the graduate program at San Jose State's Fire Weather Research Lab this fall.
The Unidata Summer Internships offer undergraduate and graduate students an opportunity to work with Unidata software engineers and scientists on projects drawn from a wide variety of areas in the atmospheric and computational sciences.
Hitting the Ground Running
Within a week of his arrival at the Program Center, Josh had released a version of his MesoPy project on GitHub. MesoPy is a small pure python wrapper around the MesoWest API; it can be used to retrieve meteorological data at over 40,000 observation stations in the United States and display the data in geographic context. Josh would be happy to get feedback from community users on MesoPy; see the GitHub project page for how to contact him.
As you might guess, this is not Josh's first exposure to either meteorology or mapping. He served as a cartographer in the United States Air Force, serving a tour of duty in Afghanistan, and later as a fire meteorology intern at the Bureau of Land Management's, Rocky Mountain Coordination Center. He began gravitating toward the use of Python while doing his undergraduate work at UNC.
Josh says he's been “really surprised and happy with how easy it is to work with the Unidata software engineers. Everyone has been so friendly and helpful in the short time I've been here — even in the first few days I feel like I've learned quite a lot.” He commented especially on the Unidata staff's focus on service to the community, saying “people in atmospheric science seem to really appreciate Unidata, and now I can see why.”
In addition to refining his MesoPy package, several other projects including contributing to the MetPy project are sparking Josh's imagination. We'll be watching with interest to see what emerges from the rest of his summer in Boulder.
Please join us in welcoming Josh to the Program Center for the summer!
