The National Science Foundation EarthCube initiative is a community-driven project aimed at creating an integrated environment for the sharing of geoscience data and knowledge in an open, transparent, and inclusive manner. EarthCube is offering students in the United States an opportunity to apply for awards of up to $2000 to develop Python-based Jupyter notebooks leveraging EarthCube tools. Applications are due by April 1, 2021.

In the spring of 2020, Unidata made an offer of resources through the Science Gateway project in order to facilitate online learning in response to the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic. Since that time, nearly 440 users — mostly undergraduates in atmospheric science programs — have been able to take advantage of cloud-based resources to access pre-configured computational notebooks for learning and teaching objectives.

For the spring 2021 term, Unidata is once again offering to provide universities (or individual instructors) access to cloud-based JupyterHub servers tailored to the needs of university atmospheric science courses and workshops. By using the Unidata Science Gateway, instructors can add Jupyter notebooks used in their coursework to a dedicated JupyterHub hosted using Unidata’s resources in the NSF Jetstream cloud. Once logged in to the JupyterHub, individual students access pre-configured computing environments that allow them to work with the notebooks interactively, making and saving their own alterations to existing notebooks or creating their own new notebooks.

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.

In the spring of 2020, Unidata made an offer of resources through the Science Gateway project in order to facilitate online learning in response to the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic. Since that time, nearly three hundred and fifty users — mostly undergraduates in atmospheric science programs — have been able to take advantage of cloud-based resources to access pre-configured computational notebooks for learning and teaching objectives.

For the fall 2020 term, Unidata is once again offering to provide universities (or individual instructors) access to cloud-based JupyterHub servers tailored to the needs of university atmospheric science courses and workshops. By using the Unidata Science Gateway, instructors can add Jupyter notebooks used in their coursework to a dedicated JupyterHub hosted using Unidata’s resources in the NSF Jetstream cloud. Once logged in to the JupyterHub, individual students access pre-configured computing environments that allow them to work with the notebooks interactively, making and saving their own alterations to existing notebooks or creating their own new notebooks.

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.