Nyctophobes beware

The United States of America will experience its second total solar eclipse of the 21st century on April 8th, 2024. Millions of Americans reside in the path of totality, and thousands of others will travel to experience the surreal midday darkening. Many of those who experienced the 2017 total solar eclipse claim the event was indescribable, breathtaking, and even humbling. For others, it was a nightmare.

The Unidata Program Center (UPC) software development team has been searching for ways to leverage the technologies behind popular packages like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion to help Earth Systems Sciences researchers, educators, and students reach scientific conclusions more quickly and with less effort. Augmenting our scientific visualization and analysis packages with modern machine learning features will help you understand environmental conditions — real or imagined! — more quickly and easily.

Everyone loves to talk about the weather. But until now, serious collectors of weather memorabilia have been left on the sidelines. Oh, a lucky few manage to save enormous hailstones in their freezers, but most are limited to screen shots of satellite or radar imagery, or maybe articles clipped from the local newspaper.

But never fear: Unidata is preparing to bring weather collectibles into the twenty-first century by minting a series of Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) based on significant weather events. Our inaugural series will consist of 902 distinct NFTs of Hurricane Katrina, one for each millibar of the storm's lowest recorded atmospheric pressure.

A container ship blocking the Suez Canal

For 6 days, 3 hours, and 38 minutes in late March, the Golden-class container ship Ever Given blocked the Suez canal, leaving more than 400 vessels piled up on either end of the canal as they waited for the stranded container ship to be refloated. While media coverage of the incident has focused on potential shortages of goods like petroleum, food, and bathroom tissue, little attention was paid to the potential for worldwide data shortages as a result of the reduction in shipping capacity.

Here at the Unidata Program Center, we know that geoscience data is important to you, and we want to do all we can to keep you informed as the efforts to slow the spread of coronavirus continue.

Although we are dedicated to maintaining community access to our data services, the National Science Foundation has not declared the Program Center to be critical infrastructure. Access to our physical location is currently highly restricted. As a result, Unidata will be providing

at least until social distancing recommendations are eased.