Everyone has been really excited about exploring the incredibly high resolution GOES-16 imagery that is now available in an experimental capacity. We host some of this data on out THREDDS test server and it can be ingested with siphon and plotted in Python! In this week’s MetPy Monday we’ll go over how to use interactive widgets to select the region and channel to plot and produce images from the data.

Hurricane Irma

Wow! We’ve had a very active couple of weeks in the Atlantic and I wanted to break the planned series of MetPy Monday posts with a bit of timely data analysis and some interesting animations. The new (and still experimental/non-operational) GOES-16 satellite has provided us with some incredible views of hurricanes Harvey and Irma, and likely will with Jose as well.

Last Monday was a big day for folks in the geoscience and astrosciences — the 2017 total solar eclipse! Many of those on the Unidata team made the drive to be in the path of totality, where the sun was completely blocked for a period of up to two and a half minutes. In this MetPy Monday post, we will take a look at some animations made in Python and posted by the team just after the eclipse.

I recently installed a weather station in my back yard. Every day I look at the display and see the temperature, wind, rain, and humidity, but the dewpoint is not displayed by default! As it turns out, dewpoint is a tricky thing to directly measure. The only way to directly measure it is with a fogged mirror sensor. Otherwise a hygrometer or psychrometer can be used to measure humidity or wet-bulb temperature, and then the dewpoint can be calculated. MetPy has the calculation functions to do both of these conversions. In this week’s MetPy Monday I’ll show you how to use the Jupyter Notebook’s interactive widgets to make a dewpoint calculator with slider widgets. This is a great way to get students to interact with formulas and get an intuitive sense of how they work!

This document proposes adding compression to the netcdf-3 (aka classic) file format. The proposal has numerous limitations because of the nature of the existing netcdf-3 format.

The algorithm and data format proposed here requires re-writing an existing netcdf-3 file to move it to the new format. In effect, the re-written file becomes archival (read-only).