The Weather Analysis Display (WAND) Tool: Developing a Meteorological Data Display Tool for Situational Awareness during Day of Launch of Space Launch Vehicles Using Python

Atmospheric conditions are an important driver in the design and operation of space

launch vehicles. The Profile Envision and Splicing Tool (PRESTO) was developed by the

Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) Natural Environments Branch (EV44) to generate

vertically complete atmospheric profiles from various data sources at NASA’s Kennedy

Space Center, co-located on the United States Air Force Eastern Range at the Cape

Canaveral Air Force Station, for NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) day-of-launch

loads and trajectory analysis. PRESTO was designed solely to generate a vertically

complete atmospheric profile; however, EV44 has also been tasked to provide a quality

assessment of meteorological data. Thus, EV44 developed Weather Analysis Display

(WAND) to visualize data from all available observation systems in conjunction with

climatological databases. WAND can display data from various sources in multiple ways

including Skew-T Log-P plots, time-height cross sections, and time series. WAND was

developed in Python taking advantage of NumPy for data handling, matplotlib and MetPy

for data visualization, and Tkinter for the execution of the graphical user interface. This

paper describes in full detail WAND’s various data visualizations and their Python coding.