AMS Short Course on Plotting in Python with MetPy: GEMPAK-like Plots Made Easy
The use of the Python programming language has grown immensely over the past decade and has become an essential tool within education, research, and industry within the atmospheric sciences. This course aims to introduce attendees to the plotting capabilities incorporated into the MetPy library. Specifically, over the past two years a declarative plotting interface has been incorporated into the module to make it easier to make high-quality graphics without deep knowledge of the Scientific Python module stack. Examples of plotting will cover skew-T analysis, satellite imagery, model output, and surface plots, as well as remote data access using the Siphon module. Some prior Python knowledge is helpful, but not required.
The goal of the course is to have attendees learn how to use Python to replace their use of GEMPAK for plotting and analysis of weather data. The focus of the course will be applying the MetPy library’s collection of calculations and plotting tools. Attendees will gain experience accessing remote datasets, using MetPy to calculate sounding quantities, and plotting these quantities on weather maps, including station plots. Special emphasis will be placed on using MetPy’s declarative, GEMPAK-like plotting interface. The course will also include time for attendees to apply Python to migrating some of their own, existing GEMPAK scripts.
This course is extensively hands-on through the use of Jupyter notebooks and will consist of one day of interactive lecture sessions with incorporated exercises that will be completed during the short course. In addition, the afternoon sessions will be aimed at developing Jupyter notebooks that will launch each attendee to bring something tangible home from the course. The instructors for the course are:
Dr. Ryan May, UCAR/Unidata, Mr. Zach Bruick, UCAR/Unidata, and Dr. Kevin Goebbert, Valparaiso University.
Internet access will be available for this course. Participants are expected to bring their own laptops for this course?. Windows, MacOS, and Linux operating systems are generally supported. Participants will be emailed installation instructions for the course Python environment in advance of the course.
For more information please contact Ryan May at UCAR/Unidata, P.O. Box 3000, Boulder, CO 80307 (tel: 303-497-8679; email [email protected]?).
All short course/workshop attendees must register and wear a badge/ribbon. Short course/workshop registration is not included in the 99th Annual Meeting registration, and short course/workshop registration does not include registration for the 99th AMS Annual Meeting.