Unidata developers Ryan May and John Leeman, together with Kevin Goebbert from Valparaiso University, will be teaching a one-day short course titled “Python for Dynamical Meteorology Using MetPy” at the 2018 AMS Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas.
Whether you caught Monday's solar eclipse from the totality zone, from your back yard, on the Internet, or skipped the whole thing, you might find a couple of things folks at Unidata have put together interesting. A big plus: no driving or traffic jams involved!
Read on to learn how to view the path of the moon's shadow across the continental United States in the IDV, and see some animations of the eclipse created with the MetPy package.
Last week we looked at how to create a simple base map with Cartopy. In this week's MetPy Monday, we learn about contouring a field on the map and some of the idiosyncrasies of cyclic points. In the end, we will have a plot of the globe with the Coriolis parameter contoured. You can use this functionality to create height maps and more!
We'll start off with importing the tools we will use: matplotlib, MetPy calculations, MetPy units, and numpy. We're also using the magic %matplotlib inline so figures show up in the notebook instead of in separate windows.
I remember the first class I took in which the professor required that we include units by every quantity in every step of every calculation we did… or it was wrong. I thought this policy was a bit harsh, but after one or two assignments, I was getting the hang of it. By the end of the semester I realized that it was insane to work any other way. In science, we are dealing with physical quantities that represent things in the real world – and things in the real world have units. Keeping track of units throughout a calculation caught many errors I made while solving and rearranging equations. If keeping track of units on paper is a good idea, why is computing any different? In this MetPy Monday, we'll look at how MetPy uses units and how to convert between different units.
Have you ever had to manually change your path to switch between Python 2.7 and Python 3? Have you broken your research environment by installing a new package to try? Have you ever wanted to take a snapshot and backup your current Python environment? If so, you'll love Conda environments! This week we show you how to setup your own Python environments and switch between them. We also cover how to create a file defining your environment so others can recreate it. It's another video MetPy Monday!
Welcome to MetPy Mondays, the Unidata Program Center's weekly series on using the Python programming language in the atmospheric and related sciences. Join your host (and UPC developer) John Leeman, along with a rotating cast of other Python developers, for a series of short blog posts and videos on using Python to get your science done.
The series, hosted over on the Unidata Developer's blog, will bring you bite sized tutorials (always less than 10 minutes) with tips, tricks, and advice on getting up and running with Unidata Python software. The first (released on July 3, 2017) and second (released today) installments deal with installing and using the Python environment and package manager Conda. Future installments will tackle topics like dealing with unit conversion in MetPy, making maps, and displaying satellite data.
This week we continue setting up our Python environments by learning about Conda channels. We'll add the Conda Forge channel and see how to install and update packages. We'll round out the screencast by using Conda to install the most recent version of Unidata's MetPy package.
