Unidata's annual Software Training Workshops at the Unidata Program Center in Boulder, Colorado provide training and guidance on the use of Unidata software packages. While the workshops are designed primarily to benefit the academic community, representatives from government agencies and commercial entities are also invited to participate. This year's workshop ran from October 17-28, and saw strong attendance from all three groups.

In recent years we have heard from community members that it is more and more difficult to attend training workshops held at the Program Center in Boulder. As a result, we are asking for your input on the sorts of software training that would be most useful, in the hope of maximizing the benefits for our academic members while continuing to serve the larger community. Click through for a link to our Unidata Software Training Workshop Survey.

Daryl Herzmann

Daryl Herzmann of Iowa State University has been awarded the 2016 Russell L. DeSouza Award by the Unidata Users committee. The DeSouza Award honors “individuals whose energy, expertise, and active involvement enable the Unidata Program to better serve the geosciences.”

Among other activities, Herzmann administers the Iowa Environmental Mesonet website (http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/), and provides a Local Data Manager (LDM) feed of the data to community members. He has been instrumental in mantaining a widely-used archive of case study data in GEMPAK and McIDAS AREA formats. In recent years, he has been an advocate for bringing Python-based workflows into the atmospheric science community; his presentation “Web Services & Python use for Meteorology” at the 2012 Unidata Users Workshop helped inspire efforts by Unidata Program Center developers to expand the use of Python in the community.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) EarthCube initiative is a community-driven project aimed at creating an integrated environment for the sharing of geoscience data and knowledge in an open, transparent, and inclusive manner. All members of the geoscience community are invited to participate in the 2016 EarthCube All Hands Meeting, to be held July 6-8, 2016 in Denver, Colorado.

The theme for this year's meeting is “EarthCube Connects,” emphasizing the connectivity between cyberinfrastructure (CI) technologies, geoscience domains, and geoscientists that is EarthCube's focus.

Unidata McIDAS-X Version 2016 is now available for download.

Unidata McIDAS-X v2016 is a combination of SSEC McIDAS-X v2015.[12]/2016.1, and XCD v2015.2, including additional bugfixes developed by the UPC, and various applications and enhancements from the UPC, and a variety of others. The v2016 release of Unidata McIDAS-X is, in essence, a Unidata modified/updated version of SSEC McIDAS-X 2016.1 and SSEC McIDAS-XCD 2015.2.