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Thanks to a 2015 Unidata Community Equipment Award grant, combined with matching funds from Plymouth State University, students working in the weather lab in Plymouth State's Department of Atmospheric Science & Chemistry now have 21 new workstations on which to use the Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) and AWIPS II.

During the 2015-16 academic year, the workstations were used heavily by students in a variety of classes, including Synoptic Meteorology, Atmospheric Physics, Instrumentation & Observations, Mesoscale Meteorology, Numerical Weather Prediction, Satellite & Radar Meteorology, and our meteorological computer application class, which provides in depth instruction with IDV and ISL. Furthermore, students used the workstations to produce scholarly research in areas such as atmospheric rivers, orographic precipitation, and explosive extratropical cyclone intensification over the North Pacific.

Vector display of air parcels in hurricane Sandy
(Click to enlarge)

The Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) version 5.3 is now available. This version of IDV has notable system, display, and data improvements.

IDV 5.3 takes advantage of the latest versions of the netCDF-Java and VisAD libraries, both of which allow more efficient data access than previous versions. This leads to less memory use on the local system while still providing the same functionality as the prior IDV releases.

The Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) version 5.3 is available now. This is a major release and is recommended for all users.

Read on for a list of new features and changes.

A fully-interactive IDV in a web browser.

As part of the Unidata Program Center's continuing investigations into the use of Unidata technologies in cloud computing environments, UPC developers have created a version of the Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) that runs in a Docker container and displays the IDV interface in a web browser.

The CloudIDV container can be run on any computer that has the Docker containerization software installed — currently linux, MacOSX, and Windows versions of Docker are available. If you are already running Docker on your own system, you can easily experiment with the CloudIDV container. If you're new to Docker, read on for details on how to get started.