What’s New and What’s Coming in MetPy

MetPy is an open-source Python package for meteorological and atmospheric science applications, leveraging significantly many other pieces of the scientific Python stack (e.g. numpy, matplotlib, scipy, etc.). Its goal is to provide tested, reusable components suitable to a wide array of tasks, including scripted data visualization and analysis. The guiding principle is to make MetPy easy to use with any dataset that can be read into Python. MetPy’s general functionality breaks down into: reading data, meteorological calculations, interpolation, and meteorology-specific plotting. MetPy also has significant integration with XArray, as well as extended support for interpreting netCDF Climate and Forecasting Convention metadata.

This talk gives an overview of recent developments in the project, including a discussion of changes and new features that were included in the 1.5, 1.6, and 1.7 releases during the last year, which includes support for drawing fronts and boundaries, parse surface bulletins from the Weather Prediction Center, inclusion of virtual temperature correction for CAPE/CIN, enhancements to the simplified plotting interface, and numerous community-contributed calculation functions. Updates on the work to improve MetPy’s runtime performance will also be presented. We will also present on our experience building and running benchmarking infrastructure hosted on GitHub Actions.