Proposals for the 2021 Community Equipment Awards are due
March 26, 2021.

Unidata offers computer equipment grants to support a variety of projects

The Unidata Program Center is pleased to announce the opening of the 2021 Unidata Community Equipment Awards solicitation. Created under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation, Unidata equipment awards are intended to encourage new members from diverse disciplinary backgrounds in the geosciences to join the Unidata community, and to encourage existing members to continue their active participation, enhancing the community process. For 2021, a total of $100,000 is available for awards; proposals for amounts up to $20,000 will be considered.

Students! Are you looking to make the transition to Python but unsure of where to start? Do you already know Python but want to see atmospheric science specific applications? Are you looking for data? If so, then please join us for a hands-on AMS Student Conference Python Workshop where beginners and experts alike will learn skills that enhance their ability to find, analyze, and explore data. All the workshop resources will be in the cloud, so no specialized local software installations are necessary. All you need is a laptop or tablet (a keyboard may be helpful) and a GitHub ID to participate.

Members of the Unidata Program Center staff will be attending the 101st annual American Meteorology Society meeting, to be held virtually 9-15 January 2021. The schedule below lists sessions or posters presented by staff members. It also lists times when we'll be available to chat in our AMS Virtual Booth.

Note: while the larger UCAR organization has an official booth in the virtual exhibit hall, Unidata has chosen a system we think makes video chat interactions a little easier. We've set up a separate site that allows you to join us via the Airmeet virtual events platform. We hope you'll stop by with questions, or just to chat, during our exhibit hours.

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 440 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 spring 2021 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.