Students in the University of Salento's Advanced Data Management course

Climate Change research is becoming an ever more data intensive and oriented scientific activity. Petabytes of climate data are continuously produced, delivered, accessed, and processed by scientists and researchers at multiple sites at an international level. The Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change (CMCC) and the University of Salento in Italy are using equipment purchased with a Unidata Community Equipment Grant to help students study climate change issues at both global and regional (Mediterranean area) scales.

Video display wall at the NOAA/CDC Lab in Boulder

The University of Colorado at Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) Climate Diagnostics Center (CDC) maintains a repository of climate datasets that is used daily by researchers and educators at CIRES and around the world. These datasets are being used to answer questions about the Earth's climate system, such as the cause and nature of extreme climate events like the 2010 Russian Heat Wave. We received funds from the 2011 Unidata Community Equipment Awards program to purchase a new server to enhance and expand our existing THREDDS Data Server (TDS) capabilities and establish a RAMADDA server at the CDC in order to provide end-to-end data services that facilitate research and education in the climate sciences.

Student using the THREDDS server to acquire Landsat imagery.

New Mexico State University's community data portal uses Unidata's Thematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services (THREDDS) Data Server and Repository for Archiving, Managing and Accessing Diverse Data (RAMADDA) server applications. The portal makes data sets that have been archived at NMSU's Center for Applied Remote Sensing in Agriculture, Meteorology and Environment (CARSAME) and New Mexico Climate Center available to the public.

Unidata's LDM, THREDDS, RAMADDA, and other technologies play integral roles in Pennsylvania State University's provision of meteorological data to their own students and researchers and to the wider university community. A 2011 Community Equipment Award helped Penn State upgrade some of their servers to be more capable and reliable.

The Unidata Program Center would like to remind members of our community that the deadline for the 2012 Unidata Community Equipment Awards is March 9, 2012.

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 2012, a total of $100,000 is available for awards; proposals for amounts up to $20,000 will be considered.