MetPy Development and On-going Plans

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 for Python 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 1.7 and 1.8 releases during the last year, which includes support for drawing fronts and boundaries using MetPy’s simplified plotting interface, support for automatically identifying high/low (or max/min) centers and plotting them, new clients for accessing cloud-based data archives, as well as various community contributed enhancements. Updates on the work to improve MetPy’s runtime performance by interfacing with native code will also be presented.