Modernizing NHC Products with the Power of Python

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) has used GEMPAK, a visualization package originally adapted for use by the National Weather Service (NWS) National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) in the 1980’s, to produce most operational graphical products for the past 30 years. GEMPAK was also used by NCEP to create NAWIPS, a software package used by all of NCEP for the visualization of satellite, model, and observational data. Community support for GEMPAK ended in 2021, and NCEP is making an effort to retire NAWIPS in favor of AWIPS-2, the operational visualization software used by the rest of the NWS. The NHC has consequently started creating some operational graphical products using Python instead of GEMPAK. In addition to being a modern programming language with extensive community support, Python has the ability to be more adaptive to future needs of the NHC product suite. In this presentation, we will demonstrate the initial improvements that have already been made to existing graphical products and explore possibilities for improvements to our products in the future.