Mike Zuranski

Mike Zuranski of the College of DuPage has been awarded the 2020 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.”

Zuranski has been contributing to the well-known NexLab site as a student at the College of DuPage in 2011, and has been a Meteorology Support Analyst for the program since 2016.

Spend the summer in beautiful Boulder, Colorado (maybe...)

Do you use Unidata software packages? Do you love to write code? The Unidata Summer Internship program is looking for you!

The Unidata Summer Internship offers 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. Unidata's mission is to support the Earth Science research and education community with data and tools for data access, analysis, and visualization. As a Unidata intern, you'll pursue the goal of adding innovative enhancements to data access, analysis, and visualization tools developed within Unidata.

Unidata is looking for graduate and undergraduate students in the geosciences to share their views on remote learning environments. The Unidata Users Committee and Unidata Program Center staff want to hear about your experiences, needs, and wishes for remote learning during a special online discussion session.

The panel discussion will be held be from 1:00 to 1:55 PM MST on November 13, 2020. We're hoping to have roughly six students representing a variety of atmospheric science and related programs share their thoughts about what works well in remote learning situations, what doesn't work, and what might be done to improve the experience. Each student will have a short opportunity (3-4 minutes) to share their experience, followed by a dialogue with the Users Committee. A synthesis of the discussion will be shared with the Unidata community to communicate lessons learned.

In the spring of 2020, Unidata made an offer of resources through the Science Gateway project in order to facilitate online learning in response to the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic. Since that time, nearly three hundred and fifty users — mostly undergraduates in atmospheric science programs — have been able to take advantage of cloud-based resources to access pre-configured computational notebooks for learning and teaching objectives.

For the fall 2020 term, Unidata is once again offering to provide universities (or individual instructors) access to cloud-based JupyterHub servers tailored to the needs of university atmospheric science courses and workshops. By using the Unidata Science Gateway, instructors can add Jupyter notebooks used in their coursework to a dedicated JupyterHub hosted using Unidata’s resources in the NSF Jetstream cloud. Once logged in to the JupyterHub, individual students access pre-configured computing environments that allow them to work with the notebooks interactively, making and saving their own alterations to existing notebooks or creating their own new notebooks.

The conventions for CF (Climate and Forecast) metadata are designed to promote the processing and sharing of files created with the NetCDF API. There will be a virtual workshop to meet and discuss CF-related topics held June 9-11, 2020; meetings are limited to three hours each day.