I recently installed a weather station in my back yard. Every day I look at the display and see the temperature, wind, rain, and humidity, but the dewpoint is not displayed by default! As it turns out, dewpoint is a tricky thing to directly measure. The only way to directly measure it is with a fogged mirror sensor. Otherwise a hygrometer or psychrometer can be used to measure humidity or wet-bulb temperature, and then the dewpoint can be calculated. MetPy has the calculation functions to do both of these conversions. In this week’s MetPy Monday I’ll show you how to use the Jupyter Notebook’s interactive widgets to make a dewpoint calculator with slider widgets. This is a great way to get students to interact with formulas and get an intuitive sense of how they work!
