Learn how to use virtual environments and how they stack up to Conda in this week's #MetPyMonday!

Rhoen Fiutak

by Rhoen Fiutak
2022 Unidata summer intern

This summer, I worked with Unidata AWIPS (Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System), contributing to educational resources for and outreach within Unidata's user community. Unidata AWIPS supports two visualization frameworks for rendering meteorological and geographic data: CAVE, a graphical user interface (GUI) application, and Python-AWIPS, a programmatic application programming interface (API) for EDEX. Users can learn about each through multiple resources, including blog posts on topical updates and tutorials via AWIPS Tips, eLearning courses like Learn AWIPS CAVE, and examples of data plotting with Python-AWIPS.

Parsing text files is one thing, but turning them into GIS ready polygons is another! This week we look at parsing a CSV of AIRMETS and SIGMETS.

In the forthcoming 18.1.1 AWIPS release:

• Inclusion of new AWIPS Hazards plugins for decision assistance (new product generation tools and hydro configurations to integrate with WarnGen and the Hydro perspective).
• New Space Weather Prediction Center plugins for Geomagnetic Data, Solar Imagery, Generic High Cadence Data, and Time Series displays).
• Unidata now has the source code to build 64-bit Hydro Applications (these Hydroapps were supplied as 32-bit binaries in the Vlab source code repositories, which were disabled in previous Unidata AWIPS releases).
• OGC and Data Delivery plugins will be made available in the 18.1.1 release as an optional add-on to a standard EDEX Data Server installation (two additional RPMs).
• OHD and Hydro Applications will also be made available as optional EDEX add-ons in the awips2-edex-dat and awips2-hydroapps RPMs.
• New roles/permissions framework.
• Database reconfiguration (moved from /awips2/data to /awips2/database/data, now with 'awipsadmin' ownership).
• Fix CAVE crash when starting GFE for non-activated site.
• Updates to allow dynamic contributions to the Volume Browser.
• Updates to the Qpid Broker and Localization REST configuration including Protected File status.
• New viz method IGLMesh for easier extensibility.
• Ability to handle derived parameter cubes at a single point.
• Search By Name has been added to the Localization Perspective.
• ADE updates for Eclipse 4.6.1.
• Geotools updated to 16.4.
• Cython updated to 0.28.3.
• httpd-pypies updated to 2.4.27.
• python-dateutil updated to 2.7.3.
• qpid-lib updated to 1.38.0.
• werkzeug updated to 0.14.1.
• yajsw updated to 12.09.

Shown here are plots for Base Reflectivity (N0Q, 94) and Base Velocity (N0U, 99) using AWIPS data rendered with Matplotlib, Cartopy, and MetPy. This example improves upon existing Level 3 Python rendering by doing the following:

• Display scaled and labeled colorbar below each figure.
• Plot radar radial images as coordinate maps in Cartopy and label with lat/lon.
• 8 bit Z and V colormap and data scaling added to MetPy from operational AWIPS.
• Level 3 data are retrieved from the Unidata EDEX Cloud server (edex-cloud.unidata.ucar.edu)
• Raw HDF5 byte data are converted to product values.