A One-Stop Shop for Atmospheric Science Python: The Unidata Python Training Site

As the Python programming language becomes more ubiquitous in atmospheric science education and research, new users face the hurdle of learning Python syntax, libraries, and functionality. Additionally, given the specific use cases and datasets within meteorology, general tutorials of Python are not sufficient to provide full context and support for their problems and goals. At Unidata, we seek to provide a starting point for any atmospheric scientist to use Python for meteorological education and research by lowering the bar for learning the language and seeing its utility for their work. While Unidata has supported various tutorials, trainings, and example galleries for Python through its online repositories and websites over the last several years, the organization of these materials has been convoluted and confusing for users. As a result, the training materials produced by the Unidata Python team have been condensed into a single source: the Unidata Python Training Site for Atmospheric Science. This new site aims to serve as a one-stop shop for anyone using Python for atmospheric science and meteorology data analysis and visualization. It contains a Python starting guide for first-time users, detailed examples of Unidata’s Python packages, MetPy and Siphon, and Jupyter notebooks from workshops for in-depth training on the scientific Python ecosystem. By condensing all of the training materials, usage examples, and tutorials into one site, we aim to better support the growth of Python within the atmospheric science community. Additionally, we hope that this single site will promote more contributions from the community towards our training materials and examples, which serve as an easy starting point for contributing towards Open Source software.