This summer, I worked with Unidata AWIPS (Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System), contributing to educational resources for and outreach within Unidata's user community. Unidata AWIPS supports two visualization frameworks for rendering meteorological and geographic data: CAVE, a graphical user interface (GUI) application, and Python-AWIPS, a programmatic application programming interface (API) for EDEX. Users can learn about each through multiple resources, including blog posts on topical updates and tutorials via AWIPS Tips, eLearning courses like Learn AWIPS CAVE, and examples of data plotting with Python-AWIPS.
I started my summer internship with the goals of understanding software development and improving my coding practices to feel confident writing reproducible and sharable code. My time at Unidata not only gave me a structure for writing sharable pieces of software, but also helped me in exploring data manipulation and visualization practices to their full creative extent.
The focus of my summer internship was working on MetPy, both adding new functionality and updating existing documentation to reflect recent updates to MetPy. In particular, I focused on expanding current declarative syntax functionality to Matplotlib's pcolormesh via the RasterPlot class. Declarative syntax enables quick and easy plotting of data, particularly for users new to Python or MetPy.