Utilizing Python as a scripting language for the McIDAS-V visualization package

McIDAS-V is a freely available open-source meteorological visualization application developed by the University of Wisconsin's Space Science and Engineering Center that provides a unified user interface for the display of a wide variety of data sources and formats including both geostationary and polar orbiting satellite imagery, output from numerical weather models, and point observations. However, until recently McIDAS-V has had only limited capabilities in the area of automated product generation. To address this limitation, the latest release of the software features a new scripting API using Jython, a Java-based implementation of the Python programming language. The focus of these new scripting tools is to make common tasks such as satellite imagery generation available to the user via a consistent, simple-to-use, and well-documented Python API.

This presentation will describe how Python is used to ease the automation of common tasks in the most recent version of McIDAS-V. In addition, heavy development of the McIDAS-V Python scripting API is ongoing, so the latest additions and future plans will be described. In particular, the new scripting tools will allow numerical manipulation of the user's data sources, enhancing the utility of McIDAS-V for quantitative analysis and algorithm development.