The Unidata Program Center's two summer student interns — Hailey Johnson from the University of Florida and Jon Thielen from Iowa State University — have come to the end of their summer appointments. After a summer of dedicated work they presented the results of their projects to the UPC staff on August 3, 2018. You can find videos of their presentations to the UPC staff on the Unidata Seminar Series page.
Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi will be hosting a Unidata Regional Software Training Workshop August 30-31, 2018. Unidata software developers will be leading the Python-focused workshop, which will cover the use of the MetPy and Siphon packages in the context of atmospheric science. A basic familiarity with Python is assumed — check out the Unidata Online Python Training for a refresher.
Unidata holds regional workshops in part to facilitate easy access to software training for those who may not be able to travel to training workshops held at the Unidata Program Center in Boulder, Colorado. Attendance is explicitly not limited to Jackson State students and staff; we encourage those within easy travel distance to consider attending.
During this past summer at Unidata, I worked primarily on MetPy by implementing cross section functionality and improving xarray integration. The ability to work with cross sections in MetPy has been frequently requested by users, and it was one of the major features present in GEMPAK but still missing from MetPy. Also, since MetPy is moving towards having xarray DataArrays and Datasets as its primary data structures, the development team thought it best to implement the new cross section interpolation and supporting calculations using xarray.
