NSF Unidata: The evolution of a community-focused data and software facility over a four-decade period

NSF Unidata is a community-focused data and software facility, funded primarily by the United States National Science Foundation. NSF Unidata’s mission is to provide the data services, tools, and cyberinfrastructure leadership that advance Earth Systems science, enhance educational opportunities, and broaden participation. NSF Unidata’s hallmark has been democratizing access to data and tools by providing open and free access to all its resources.

As the enabler of a broad community, NSF Unidata

 

• Acquires and distributes data to facilitate Earth system education and research
• Develops software for accessing, managing, analyzing, visualizing, and effectively using those data
• Provides comprehensive support to users
• Conducts training workshops on Unidata software packages
• Facilitates advancement of standards, conventions, and interoperability
• Provides leadership in geosciences cyberinfrastructure and fosters technological change
• Advocates on behalf of the university community on data issues and negotiates data agreements
• Fosters community interaction and engagement to promote sharing of data, tools, and ideas
• Grants equipment awards to universities to enable and enhance participation in Unidata

 

An integrated approach that transcends disciplinary and geographic boundaries is needed to understand and address societally important environmental problems such as weather prediction, climate change, and the water cycle. Similarly, an Earth Systems Science approach that employs inquiry-based learning is recommended for teaching geoscience. Advances in the Earth system science are possible only through state-of-the-art, robust, and flexible data and software infrastructure, transparent and seamless access to high-quality data from diverse sources, along with requisite tools and services to analyze, synthesize, visualize, interpret, and use the data effectively.

 

The university community conceived and established the NSF Unidata program more than forty years ago to meet the needs meteorology departments, specifically to acquire and distribute real-time weather data to U.S. universities, together with the necessary tools for data analysis and visualization.

 

While the program’s primary mission of serving the academic community remains unchanged through the years, the user base has broadened, and its activities and portfolio of products and services have grown as the discipline and community needs have evolved.

 

 

Over the past four decades, NSF Unidata has experienced a gradual but natural evolution from a program focused primarily on synoptic scale meteorology to one that serves a broader geosciences community. Unidata has attracted a broader community because it has been successful in providing tools and services that are open, free, interoperable, extensible, and platform independent. The robustness and quality of Unidata tools and services have resulted in their use beyond a community of several dozen universities in the U.S. to now several thousand organizations in academia, research and operational sectors in over 150 countries. In the process, NSF Unidata has matured into a cornerstone, cloud-based data and software facility upon which the Earth system science community and other stakeholders have come to rely.

In this talk, I’ll present NSF Unidata’s evolution over the past forty years, how we are reimagining our future activities in delivering a comprehensive suite of products and services to meet the current and emerging needs of the Earth Systems Science research and education community, and the lessons learned as the facility evolved.