I.M. Systems group has partnered with the City University of New York to establish a mentorship program for CUNY graduate students. This program is sponsored by the JPSS initiative for outreach and education, and seeks to introduce young scientists to the JPSS program.
During the first four to five weeks of the summer internship, IMSG scientists work with support from the Cooperative Institute for Climate & Studies (CICS) at the University of Maryland to provide multi-day workshops in Fortran 90, C++, and PERL programming. During these workshops, students specifically work with data formats common to the JPSS mission, such as NetCDF-4 and HDF-5. Workshops also provide background on the standards and procedures followed by IMSG for the JPSS mission.
In conjunction with these workshops, volunteers from the JPSS program provide a comprehensive background of the JPSS program to students. These lectures include instrument-specific seminars, satellite derived products, product processing, public web pages for visualization, the role of satellite data in numerical models, and more.
Early in the internship, students are matched with either a NOAA or IMSG mentor that is involved in the JPSS program. As the training and lectures taper in the fifth week, students become focused on the tasks in their mentorships. The workshops are designed to allow students to spin up rapidly on their assigned mentorship tasks. Students have the opportunity to showcase their work at the STAR-JPSS Annual Science Team Meeting, held at the NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction in College Park, Maryland.