Proceedings of the 2020 Improving Scientific Software Conference

The Software Engineering Assembly (SEA) is a loosely structured group of software engineers and scientists who write scientific software, mostly but not only at NCAR and mostly but not only in the field of atmospheric sciences. The mission of the SEA is to foster a sense of community for software professionals within UCAR, to facilitate effective participation through cross-cutting interactions in UCAR's science mission, to enhance communication with management in matters of concern to software matters, and to engage UCAR software professionals as full partners in setting priorities for the design, development and maintenance of the software infrastructure needed to realize UCAR's mission. Among many initiatives to accomplish its mission, the SEA organizes a conference series, the Improving Scientific Software (ISS) Conference, formerly called simply SEA conference, which started in 2012. For the 2020 edition, because of challenges caused by the pandemic, only three papers were fully submitted by the deadline and underwent rigorous blind peer review by two reviewers per paper. They represent the best examples of the state of the practice in scientific software development, and disseminating them will contribute to improving scientific software, which is the mission of the conference.