Howard Van Dam

Howard Van Dam joined the Unidata Program Center (UPC) team on January 14 2019 as a Software Engineer. A Colorado native, he has explored the wonders of the state from the highest mountains to the eastern plains.

Howard started out studying music at University, but switched to electronics and electrical engineering as a way to provide an income while continuing to enjoy performing in jazz, classical, and musical theatre settings. He received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Colorado after completing degrees at Pikes Peak and Front Range Community Colleges. Howard also holds a CompTIA Security+ certification and is passionate about all things cybersecurity.

Love Data Week (LDW) event is to raise awareness and build a community to engage on topics related to research data management, sharing, preservation, reuse, and library-based research data services. Participants will share practical tips, resources, and stories to help researchers at any stage in their career use good data practices. Love Data Week 2019 is scheduled for February 11-15, 2019. (Generally, it takes place the week of Valentine’s Day.)

The NOAA National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) and the NASA Earth Sciences Division are pleased to announce a Satellite Meteorology Summer School on the theory and use of Satellite Data to engage graduate students and individuals with early postdoctoral appointments in the science of developing and using satellite data for the atmosphere, land, oceans, and cryosphere. The program will include internationally recognized experts in radiative transfer theory, satellite meteorology, numerical weather prediction at both the global scale and mesoscale, along with opportunities for students to interact with the lecturers in an informal setting. The objective of the program is to foster the education of the next generation of satellite meteorologists and promote the use of observations from the latest operational and research satellite missions.

Unidata's AMS booth

This year's annual American Meteorological Society meeting, was held January 6-10 in Phoenix, Arizona. While we missed interacting with those in our community who could not attend due to the shutdown of the Federal government, we were happy to see many others participating in the meeting and at our booth in the exhibit hall. As always, we were also glad to meet so many prospective community members at the AMS Student Conference.

With so much going on at the conference, we can't cover everything here. Instead, we present some highlights as recalled by UPC staff members who attended.

MetPy 0.10.0 has been released. New features of the 0.10 series include simplified plotting, unit support in xarray selection, and updates for several calculations. For full release notes see the GitHub Release Page.