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.”

MetPy 0.8.0 has been released. This release has a wide collection of new features as well as minor bug fixes, including several contributions from our community. For full release notes see the GitHub Release Page.

Registration will be opening shortly for Unidata's 2018 Software Training Workshop. The workshop features courses on Unidata's display and analysis packages MetPy, IDV, and AWIPS, as well as courses on data access and management tools including the Local Data Manager (LDM) and the THREDDS Data Server (TDS), and netCDF.

Cece Hedrick

Cece Hedrick joined the Unidata Program Center (UPC) team on October 16th, 2017 as a software developer. Her first day at the office coincided with the joint meeting of Unidata's Users' and Strategic Advisory Committees, so … we pretty much threw her in the deep end of the pool. On the bright side, Cece got an instant introduction to the community we're working for.

Cece studied astrophysics and computer science at the University of Nebraska. As an astronomer she has worked in a wide range of research categories from supermassive black holes, circumstellar disks, and symbiotic stars to the Martian atmosphere as part of NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission. As a computer scientist she has also explored a wide range of research topics, such as, bioinformatics, modeling and simulation for war gaming, and user experience/human computer interaction within the learning sciences. As a software developer, Cece has previously worked on military secure messaging and data transfer solutions, cable television software product continuous integration, and space weather prediction and analysis software.

Additional Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) have been created for Unidata technologies. We encourage you to use the DOIs when citing or otherwise referring to these technologies, because they provide a mechanism by which the information referred to can be found even if the web address underlying the DOI changes over time.

DOIs are strings of characters assigned by a registering organization to uniquely idenfity a digital resource such as a document, software package, data set, or other electronic “object.” Once a DOI is registered, metadata about the object can be associated with the identifier and maintained separately from the object itself, so that changes to the object's location can be reflected in the DOI's metadata.