Unidata is searching for a second round of geoscience researchers or research groups to participate in an NSF-funded pilot project aimed at implementing publicly-available, robust data management workflows. The initial round of this project assisted three atmospheric science projects that collected data including model output, airplane-based lidar data, and observations from a large field campaign. The second round seeks to identify additional community partners with different data management requirements.

In addition to helping researchers satisfy current funding proposal requirements, we hope to test effective methods of collecting, transforming, storing, and sharing atmospheric or related geoscience data. The methods used will be documented and published for broad community application as examples in Unidata's Data Management Resource Center (DMRC), serving to guide similar projects.

Providing data services and tools to the geoscience community is at the core of Unidata's efforts. In addition to providing direct access to data (through the Internet Data Distribution network, LDM software, and THREDDS Data Servers), Unidata also strives to make community members aware of other services that provide support for our community's research.

In February of 2013, Unidata's long time collaborative partner, the University of Wisconsin's Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC), began a program at the SSEC Data Center to provide a limited amount of archived geostationary satellite data to Unidata's academic community members at no cost. This post is a friendly reminder that members of Unidata's academic community can register with SSEC and receive up to 5 Gigabytes of archived data each month free of charge. We encourage you to investigate this valuable data resource.

Rosetta's wizard interface

By Larissa Gordon

Rosetta, one of Unidata's data transformation tools, is helping the scientific community with the standardization of data. Created by Unidata software engineer Sean Arms, Rosetta is strengthening the science community's ability to standardize raw data by providing an easy way to add appropriate metadata to ASCII files, allowing them to save and store the files in either an ASCII format (e.g. .csv) or in Climate and Forecast (CF)-compliant netCDF files. Most recently, Rosetta has helped Millersville University transform weather balloon data collected as part of a nationwide experiment.

Millersville University has been involved in an experiment known as PECAN (Plains Elevated Convection at Night). The experiment involves eight research laboratories and fourteen Universities. They share the common goal of finding the cause of an increase of mesoscale convective storms (MCSes) that occur at night during the summer months.

The National Data Integrity Conference is a gathering of people sharing new challenges and solutions regarding research data and integrity. The conference aims to provide attendees with both an understanding of data integrity issues and impart practical tools and skills to deal with them. Topics addressed will include data privacy, openness, policy, education and the impacts of sharing data, how to do it, when to do it, and when not to.

Unidata is pleased to announce the availability of the Python Data Access Framework (DAF). The DAF provides access to an AWIPS II Environmental Data EXchange (EDEX) server directly from Python code. Created by Unidata Program Center software engineer Michael James, the DAF strengthens Unidata's AWIPS II offerings by making it easier to retrieve data from the AWIPS II data storage system from outside the Common AWIPS Visualization Environment (CAVE).

Users have always been able to request real time NCEP/NWS weather data using AWIPS II, but now, with the addition of the Python DAF, users can request this data using only simple python commands.