The primary purpose of the
Unidata Community Equipment Awards is to encourage new members from
diverse
disciplinary backgrounds in the geosciences to join the Unidata community,
and for existing members to continue their active participation so as to enhance
the community process.
Between 2003 and 2023, Unidata has awarded
$1,495,662 to 113 different projects at
66 colleges and universities through the Community Equipment
Awards program.
Past equipment awards have funded projects including:
Installing or upgrading servers to ingest IDD data streams
Creating electronic map walls
Installing THREDDS Data Servers to make data available locally and regionally
Installing computing lab hardware to run visualization software such as AWIPS
and IDV
Purchasing cloud computing resources for specific educational or research
projects
Click on the links below to find information projects that received awards in
previous
years.
The
primary purpose of the Unidata Community Equipment Awards is to encourage
new members from diverse disciplinary backgrounds in the geosciences to join
the Unidata community, and for existing members to continue their active
participation
so as to enhance the community process. We will accept equipment proposals
from academic institutions engaged in teaching and research in the geosciences
for the deployment of Unidata-supported systems.
It is the intent of this award program to assist institutions wishing to
participate actively
in the Unidata community; to assist those who have participated actively
in the past but need system upgrades to meet the standards currently recommended
for deploying Unidata systems; and to assist organizations from disciplines
outside of the atmospheric community who can provide and support important
and relevant datasets and tools to the Unidata community at no cost.
Small institutions, institutions that have not previously submitted proposals to
this program,
and institutions outside Unidata's traditional atmospheric sciences community
are especially encouraged to apply.
A Brief History of the Awards
For many years the National Science
Foundation (NSF) administered the Unidata
Equipment Awards program, which was initially developed to assist smaller
universities
with becoming part of the Unidata community. In 2001, NSF decided that the
program had become too expensive for them to administer, so with encouragement
from the Policy Committee (now the Strategic Advisory Committee) and User
Committee,
Unidata proposed to take over the administration of the Equipment Awards. This
included assembling a panel of community members to review proposals and make
recommendations regarding funding. NSF granted approval and in 2003 Unidata
ran the first competitive process. Each year Unidata is committed to setting
aside money from core funds to continue the Equipment Awards program.