NSF Unidata is governed by its community. Our Strategic Advisory and Users committees facilitate consensus-building for future directions of the NSF Unidata Program and establish standards of involvement for the community. Direct involvement in the Program by the academic community helps NSF Unidata stay on top of trends in Earth Systems Science education and research; for example, recent initiatives on Python and cloud-based computing have benefited tremendously from committee advice and involvement.

We are looking for several creative people at U.S. universities and colleges who are using NSF Unidata products and services — or who are familiar with NSF Unidata — to help guide the program in addressing the needs of our growing community. Nominate someone (even yourself) to join NSF Unidata's governing committees today!

The NSF Unidata Program Center is pleased to announce the opening of the 2025 NSF Unidata Community Equipment Awards solicitation. Created under the sponsorship of the U.S. National Science Foundation, NSF Unidata equipment awards are intended to encourage new members from diverse disciplinary backgrounds in the Earth Systems Sciences to join the NSF Unidata community, and to encourage existing members to continue their active participation, enhancing the community process. For 2025, a total of $100,000 is available for awards; proposals for amounts up to $20,000 will be considered.

The deadline for 2025 Community Equipment Awards proposals has been extended until April 7, 2025.

We are happy to announce a new version of python-awips (v23.1) is available! This version is available via source code (with all example notebooks) or via mamba (conda) and pip. Please see our main documentation page for installation instructions.

This year's annual American Meteorological Society meeting was held 12-16 January 2025 in New Orleans, LA. Several NSF Unidata staff members were able to travel to New Orleans to visit with students, present papers and posters, and otherwise take part in the conference. As always, staff members spent some time meeting with community members at UCAR's exhibit hall booth. Read on for some of the conference highlights from the perspective of NSF Unidata staff.

FireWxPy is a user friendly, open source Python package to create visualizations of data specific to fire weather and fire weather forecasting, created by Eric J. Drewitz. The package is built to support a wide range of fire weather-focused visualizations for any state or GACC Region. Users can also create custom boundaries using latitude and longitude coordinates. Version 1.4.3, released February 1, 2025, allows users to create a variety of graphics, samples of which you can view in the full article.