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.

Past recipients of Unidata equipment awards have used the grants to procure equipment for data sharing, to create interactive data visualization laboratories, and to encourage the use of Unidata software packages in research and education.

Unidata is happy to announce the Community Equipment Award recipients for 2020. Five institutions received funding this year:

• College of Charleston
• Mississippi State University
• Texas A&M University
• University of Buenos Aires
• University of Hawaii at Manoa

Read on for details about the projects funded for 2020.

In the spring of 2019, Northern Illinois University (NIU) applied for and received a Unidata Community Equipment Award grant for a project titled “Bringing back weather.niu.edu: A multifaced server at Northern Illinois University.” The NIU Meteorology department (now Geographic and Atmospheric Sciences) has been involved in the dissemination of meteorological data since the late 1990s, when Russell L. DeSouza Award winner Mr. Gilbert Sebenste set up the “NIU Weather” server at weather.niu.edu. The server relayed data to dozens of Universities via the LDM and had a popular “storm machine” website that provided some of the earliest model forecast soundings. After Mr. Sebenste's departure from NIU in 2017, the server was taken off-line.

Unidata offers computer equipment grants to support a variety of projects

The Unidata Program Center is pleased to announce the opening of the 2020 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 2020, a total of $100,000 is available for awards; proposals for amounts up to $20,000 will be considered.

Note:
In keeping with Unidata's most recent proposal to the National Science Foundation for continued program funding, additional emphasis will be placed on providing support for institutions serving populations that are underrepresented in the broad geoscience community. Unidata is dedicated to broadening participation by minority serving institutions, and we particularly encourage small institutions, academic departments that have not previously submitted proposals to this program, and programs outside Unidata's traditional atmospheric sciences community to apply.

Whether you like your weather data local, pushed to you by the Unidata Local Data Manager (LDM) through the Internet Data Distribution (IDD) project, or stored remotely and accessed on demand as needed, the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Wisconsin – Madison (UW-AOS) has you covered.

The UW-AOS Department has been helping to make weather data available to the Unidata community since the early days of the IDD project. An upgraded ingest and relay cluster, made possible by funding from the 2018 Unidata Equipment Awards grant program, has now enabled UW-AOS to serve the GOES16 and GOES17 data along with everything else to additional downstream sites.