The Unidata program and the University of Wisconsin–Madison's Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) have a long history of collaboration and cooperation to serve the needs of Unidata community members. The SSEC Satellite Data Services(SDS) group, which provides access to and distribution of real-time and archive weather satellite data, makes limited amounts of archive satellite data available to Unidata's academic community members at no cost via the “Multi-format Client-agnostic File Extraction Through Contextual HTTP” (MCFETCH) system.

Unidata developer Ryan May is a co-PI on a recently-awarded grant by the National Science Foundation's EarthCube program. The grant, which brings together collaborators from Unidata, NCAR's Computational & Information Systems Laboratory (CISL), NCAR's Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory (CGD), and the University at Albany, SUNY, funds Project Pythia: A Community Learning Resource for Geoscientists.

Project Pythia aims to provide web-accessible training to help current and future geoscientists understand and use the ever-expanding volume of numerical scientific data. The project will leverage Jupyter Notebooks as the primary delivery mechanism for training examples, curricula, and as an interactive computing platform. The content for Project Pythia will be hosted on GitHub and maintained using an Open Development model that will facilitate and encourage contributions from a broad user community, as well as help ensure the long-term sustainability of the project.

Angelie Nieves-Jiménez

Angelie Nieves-Jiménez entered UCAR’s Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research and Science (SOARS) program as a protégé in 2019, beginning an undergraduate research project studying sea breezes affecting her home island of Puerto Rico. As a rising senior at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, she was set to continue her research as part of the SOARS program in 2020. While the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic up-ended her plan to return to Boulder for the summer, a combination of remote teaching, mentorship, and computing resources allowed her to make progress on her research.

Unidata's AWIPS development team is looking for input from users of Unidata's AWIPS distribution. They'd like to learn about which datasets you're currently using or would like to use, and which features of AWIPS are most important for your workflows.

The 2019 Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics & Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) National Diversity in STEM Conference was held October 31 - November 2 in Honolulu, Hawai'i. This is the largest multidisciplinary and multicultural STEM diversity event in the country, and Unidata was fortunate to be able to send staff member Jeff Weber to attend. Jeff was able to make valuable connections for Unidata and for the UCAR Community Programs (UCP) in general.