Angelie Nieves-Jiménez

Angelie Nieves-Jiménez entered UCAR’s Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research and Science (SOARS) program as a protégé in 2019, beginning an undergraduate research project studying sea breezes affecting her home island of Puerto Rico. As a rising senior at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, she was set to continue her research as part of the SOARS program in 2020. While the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic up-ended her plan to return to Boulder for the summer, a combination of remote teaching, mentorship, and computing resources allowed her to make progress on her research.

Faculty members in the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) Oceanography Department are embarking upon a new voyage: to learn Python. The USNA Oceanography Department has traditionally used Matlab as the primary tool to analyze and visualize geosciences data. To build on that coding success and align with the efforts of the geosciences community, at the start of the spring 2020 semester, Associate Professor Bradford Barrett and Instructor Alexander Davies organized a “Python Book Club” in which faculty members meet once or twice a month to collaboratively learn Python. Because USNA is a small undergraduate-only institution with resource limitations and complex federal networking restrictions, Barrett (USNA’s UCAR Representative) and Davies (currently serving on the Unidata Users Committee) reached out to Unidata for help.

During the Fall semester of 2018, Notre Dame of Maryland University (NDMU) piloted a small seminar course in scientific computing intended for junior and senior undergraduates majoring in math, physics, engineering, or computer science. The goal was to develop and test a multi-disciplinary course, which would ultimately be added as an upper-level elective in these programs. Because NDMU is a small, primarily undergraduate, teaching university with limited computational resources, we reached out to Unidata to ask if we could test our new course using JupyterHub resources that are part of the Unidata Science Gateway. Having never offered this course before, we were uncertain the extent of the resources needed and the commitment needed to maintain and tweak those resources as the course progressed. Partnering with Unidata offered us a way to gain this expertise while getting access to the resources we needed for the class.

The Unidata Program Center is pleased to announce the availability of a JupyterHub server tailored to the needs of the atmospheric science community. Using resources provided by the National Science Foundation's Jetstream cloud-computing platform, Unidata's JupyterHub server is intended to serve as a demonstration of a notebook-based workflow for geoscience activities. After preliminary testing in a variety of situations including workshop and classroom use, Unidata staff are looking to expand beta-testing of the server to the wider community.