Nicole Corbin

Nicole Corbin joined the Unidata Program Center on February 1st, 2021 as an Educational Designer. Prior to joining Unidata, Nicole created learning content and educational experiences for technical support staff at Esri focusing on desktop GIS, Microsoft Windows administration, Python, and customer service. Nicole is passionate about instructional design and is always keeping up on the latest in learning sciences. Her professional interests include adult learning theories, inquiry-based learning, and modular/micro-learning.

Although she's been working in the GIS sector for the past five years, Nicole's background is in meteorology. She received both her Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in Meteorology from North Carolina State University. It was there that she first became interested in discipline-based education research and pedagogy, and was able to experiment with creating educational content for university students. Her very first educational module covered hail growth processes. Now, at Unidata, she is excited to continue creating learning and outreach content for the greater Earth systems science community.

In case you missed it — here's a recap of news from the Unidata Program Center for the month of January, 2021.

Simplified data handling with xarray.

Version 1.0 of the MetPy collection of tools in Python for reading, visualizing, and performing calculations with weather data was released on December 22, 2020. MetPy provides tested, reusable Python components suitable to a wide array of tasks common in meteorological and atmospheric science applications, including scripted data visualization and analysis. In adding this functionality, MetPy aims to mesh well with the broader scientific Python ecosystem — widely used projects including Numpy, Scipy, Matplotlib, xarray, and others.

Version 1.0 of MetPy is now available. MetPy is a collection of tools in Python for reading, visualizing, and performing calculations with weather data. The project aims to mesh well with the rest of the scientific Python ecosystem, including the Numpy, Scipy, and Matplotlib projects, adding functionality specific to meteorology.

While MetPy has been around as an Open Source project since 2008, development resources have been limited, and version 1.0 is the first stable release. The word “stable” here does not imply that previous 0.x releases were not robust — MetPy has been in wide use for quite some time now — but rather that the development team has reached a stage where they are confident in promising to keep the software API stable until the next major release. This promise of API stability should give MetPy users confidence that the code they write using MetPy will continue to work unaltered for a significant period of time.

In case you missed it — here's a recap of news from the Unidata Program Center for the month of December, 2020.