Zach Bruick

Zach Bruick joined the Unidata Program Center (UPC) team on June 3, 2019 as a Software Engineer. After finishing his Master's degree in Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University in May, he has jumped in to apply his talents to Unidata's mix of science, software development, and training activities.

Zach earned a Bachelor's degree in Meteorology — along with a major in Geography and a minor in Mathematics — from Valparaiso University before heading to Colorado State. He first encountered Unidata while working with GEMPAK and the LDM as part of Valparaiso's undergraduate meteorology curriculum, and he's been immersed in the scientific Python ecosystem since his Junior year. In addition to his university coursework, Zach has honed his scientific skills through student research and internship positions with NASA and NOAA.

The 100th American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting in will be held 12–16 January 2020 in Boston, MA. The submission deadline for abstracts is 1 August 2019.

See the Call for Papers for details.

The American Geophysical Union continues to celebrate its centennial as well. The 2019 Fall Meeting in will be held 9-13 December 2019 in San Francisco, CA. The submission deadline for abstracts is 31 July 2019.

See the Fall Meeting website for details.

The Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) version 5.6 is now available. This is a major release with new features including an isentropic advection derived parameter, a 3D streamline display, new display types for the 3D grid tracer display, and a chooser for Geostationary Lightning Mapper data from ADDE servers. In addition, the release includes updates to existing features and incorporates the latest netCDF-Java library.

NetCDF has historically offered two different storage formats for the netCDF data model: files based on the original netCDF binary format, and files based on the HDF5 format. While this has proven effective in the past for traditional disk storage, it is less efficient for modern cloud-focused technologies such as those provided by Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud Object Storage, and other cloud service providers. To that end, the Unidata development team is happy to announce that we are expanding the storage solutions available through the netCDF software libraries.

Note: The deadline for nominations for Unidata committee appointments beginning in the fall of 2019 has been extended until July 7, 2019.

Unidata Users and Strategic Advisory Committees

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

The Unidata Program Center is seeking new people to serve on Unidata's Strategic Advisory and Users Committees. This is your chance to make a difference on behalf of the Unidata community. As Sepideh Yalda, the current Chair of the Unidata Strategic Advisory Committee notes, “Unidata has and continues to serve a critical role in providing data and services to the earth and related sciences community. The opportunity to serve as a member on Unidata governance committees provides you with the ability to contribute and help guide the future developments in data sharing and the associated services in support of research and education in atmospheric sciences.”