Welcome back to AWIPS Tips! Today's focus is on CAVE'S Volume Browser. The Volume Browser is a tool for accessing model output and point sources like RAOB, METAR, and Profiler datasets. Rather than choosing from the preconfigured options in the default Data Menus, the Volume Browser allows you to select the exact sources, fields, planes, or points to display. The Volume Browser also has options for vertical cross sections, time series, and other display types, but today we will focus specifically on the default display type: plan views.
Version 1.1.0 of MetPy, a collection of tools in Python for reading, visualizing, and performing calculations with weather data, has been released. The project aims to mesh well with the rest of the scientific Python ecosystem, including the Numpy, Scipy, and Matplotlib projects, adding functionality specific to meteorology. This release includes a variety of new features and enhancements, as well a variety of fixes for issues encountered by users.
The Unidata Program Center's three summer student interns — Lydia Bunting from Texas Tech University, Connor Cozad from the College of Charleston in South Carolina, and Isabelle Pfander from Willamette University in Oregon — 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 28, 2021. You can find videos of their presentations to the UPC staff on the Unidata Seminar Series page.
I came into this summer internship with a goal of working on the Network Common Data Form (netCDF) libraries. NetCDF is a combination of software libraries and APIs describing a data model for scientific multidimensional arrays. I planned to improve the online user guide, write tutorial code, and learn about storage and efficiency.
I spent this summer with Unidata contributing new features and improvements for version 1.1.0 of MetPy. This release is the first to introduce new features since 1.0 debuted in December 2020. I focused on enhancements to MetPy's declarative interface, which allows users to plot datasets on maps. These new capabilities provide greater control over map design and introduce support for plotting additional data formats.
This summer I worked with the Unidata tech team on addressing the MetPy 1.1.0 milestones we prepared for it to update from version 1.0.0. Throughout this process of learning how to navigate GitHub and MetPy and how to implement new code, code verification and testing played a large role.
