New Online Educational Resource (OER): Introduction to Weather Technology using MetPy

The weather technology course, for first year students at Valparaiso University, has been taught for the past thirteen years in order. The goals are to develop basic meteorological computing skills, including making and analyzing weather maps, and to build upon introductory meteorology knowledge as a bridge to our second year curriculum. Historically this course used a combination of the GEneral Meteorological PAcKage (GEMPAK) and shell scripting to generate weather maps. Since spring 2020, the course has exclusively used Python and the MetPy module with Jupyter Notebooks to build the foundational skill sets needed for map making. This new online textbook, Introduction to Weather Technology using MetPy (aka MetPy: The Book) is a compilation of course notes and computational notebooks organized into chapters focused on meteorological content coupled closely with relevant Jupyter Notebooks that demonstrate the creation of weather maps and analyses using MetPy. The full scope and structure of the textbook and the multiple benefits of the Jupyter Book framework for composing and using an interactive text will be presented. Additionally, this text has been created in the mindset of open science and for the benefit of our broader community. The intent is that the work could be reused in whole or part to support student learning in different contexts.