The Unidata Program Center's three summer student interns — Jessica Blunt from the University of Oklahoma, Max Grover from the University of Illinois, and Aodhan Sweeney from the University of Washington — 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 July 31, 2019. You can find videos of their presentations to the UPC staff on the Unidata Seminar Series page.
The primary task that I completed this summer was adding METAR functionality to MetPy. METAR stands for METeorological Aerodrome Report. METARs contain information about surface data including temperature, dew point, wind speed and direction, and several other meteorological variables. Prior to this summer, MetPy did not have the ability to parse METARs. Also, the current parser that is used to generate netCDF files on the Unidata THREDDS server had a substantial amount of missing data. By adding METAR parsing tools, we made additional surface data available to the user, making it easier to make high quality surface maps using MetPy.
