According to Scott Jacobs, acting chief of the NCEP Systems Integration Branch, NCEP Central Operations (NCO) continued its integration of NAWIPS functionality into AWIPS II during August. "The main forucs is now to make the system stable and ready for forecaster testing in November," says Jacobs. "This includes collecting, decoding and storing more data types. We have emphasized getting more numerical model grid data ingested into the database."

NCAR's Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) Research Data Archive (RDA) contains a large and diverse collection of meteorological and oceanographic observations, operational and reanalysis model outputs, and remote sensing datasets to support atmospheric and geosciences research, along with ancillary datasets, such as topography/bathymetry, vegetation, and land use.

CISL's Data Support Section, which manages the Research Data Archive, recently announced that users of some subsets of the archived data can request files in NetCDF format.

ISU student Ryan Lueck uses the IDV to display data from ISU's THREDDS server.

The Iowa State University Department of Geological and Atmospheric Sciences maintains an extensive archive of meteorological data, including textual information (severe weather statements and other National Weather Service products), numerical model output in gempak format, gif images of weather maps created daily since 2006, and gempak-format surface and upper air data going back to 1933, much of which was provided to us by NOAA's National Severe Storms Laboratory. For the past year or two, we have made NMQ estimates of precipitation available on the archive as well.

The Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) version 3.0 is a new major version of the IDV. This is a beta version release. The latest updated can be downloaded at https://downloads.unidata.ucar.edu/idv/.

This is a new major version of the IDV. New feature highlights include:

• Grid ensemble viewing capability and diagnostic functions
• Hovmoller display capability
• Improved VisAD contour labels in an effort to improve publication  quality graphics
• IDV memory allocation is now automatically done according to the user's machine specifications
• Parameter as topography display
• Adding LOGO
• etc...

For a complete list of changes, see the Release Notes.

The UCAR Research Applications Laboratory (RAL) has released version 1.4 of Nujan, a pure Java library for writing HDF5 and NetCDF4 files. Nujan is 100% open source and is released under the MIT license. Nujan is intended to be useful in situations where portability and a simplified development process are more important than access to the complete HDF5 feature set.