Exploratory 3D Visualization of Earth Sciences Data with the Vapor Python API

Vapor is an open-source 3D visualization and analysis platform developed by the NSF-National Center for Atmospheric Research. Designed for the geosciences community, VAPOR supports visualizing curvilinear and unstructured data generated by common models such as WRF and MPAS. It provides the ability to render, among others, volumes, 3D isosurfaces, particles, and flow advection. Vapor has been a well established GUI software package but as part of NCAR's Pivot to Python efforts was recently made available as a Python package. This talk will cover using Vapor to visualize meteorological simulation data in Jupyter, as well as how we migrated a C++ GUI application to a Python API.