I remember the first class I took in which the professor required that we include units by every quantity in every step of every calculation we did… or it was wrong. I thought this policy was a bit harsh, but after one or two assignments, I was getting the hang of it. By the end of the semester I realized that it was insane to work any other way. In science, we are dealing with physical quantities that represent things in the real world – and things in the real world have units. Keeping track of units throughout a calculation caught many errors I made while solving and rearranging equations. If keeping track of units on paper is a good idea, why is computing any different? In this MetPy Monday, we'll look at how MetPy uses units and how to convert between different units.
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