Python and Weather

[Kelton Halbert]

This post isn't really related to the main topic of this thread, but this is a good place to throw this in:
What you may think is "noise" in the divergence field is likely signal that the surface stations are poorly resolving. Check out the surface divergence field from a 3 km WRF simulation in this image. And this is just at 3 km grid spacing. If you went down to < 1 km, you'd see even more detail/"noise". So don't be discouraged if your plots don't turn out the way you expected. It may be legitimate!

Thanks for posting that Jeff!
I honestly had no clue the divergence field was actually that "noisy" - I honestly expected things to be more broad/synoptic scale, especially on the 30km grid I'm using. I'm now less skeptical when I look at the divergence plot now knowing it may in fact be legitimate.
Once again, thanks!

 

[Kelton Halbert]

For those of you interested, I have released the code being used to make these plots. This is a pre-alpha release and is currently un-documented; If you are interested in perusing or modifying code, I'd recommend waiting for the later release that includes proper documentation.

Blog Link: http://wp.me/pEaPJ-JK
GitHub Link: https://github.com/keltonhalbert/AWIDS

Installation instructions are in the README. Links to the required packages are included. Right now it has only been tested on Unix/Linux systems, but Python and the other required packages are usable on Windows. If anyone with experience in Python on Windows would like to test it, be my guest!

Good luck, and let me know how it goes!