Reading, writing and visualizing GRIB and netCDF data with Python (invited)

Python, along with numpy and scipy, provides a powerful set of tools for analyzing gridded data from reanalysis datasets, numerical weather prediction and climate models. Most of these data are available in either GRIB (editions 1 and 2) or netCDF (versions 3 and 4) formats. In this talk I will describe a workflow for reading and writing these datasets using pygrib (http://pygrib.googlecode.com) and netcdf4-python (http://netcdf4-python.googlecode.com) as well as creating 2-d visualization of the data on various world map projection using the basemap matplotlib toolkit (http://matplotlib.sf.net).