Rhoen Fiutak

by Rhoen Fiutak
2022 Unidata summer intern

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.

The python-awips package provides access to the entire AWIPS Maps Database for use in Python GIS applications. Map objects are returned as Shapely geometries (Polygon, Point, MultiLineString, etc.) and can be easily plotted by Matplotlib, Cartopy, MetPy, and other packages.

The Python AWIPS Data Access Framework can be used to query available grid parameters and levels if given a known Grid name (as of AWIPS 15.1.3 we can not query derived parameters, only parameters which have been directly decoded).

Unidata has been told by the NWS that

...the AWIPS II software will indeed be available to Unidata for distribution to U.S. universities, through open source licensing. In separate conversations with Raytheon people, we received the same assurance as well.

Supposedly we will get a letter from both Raytheon and the NWS "before the Users Committee meeting in early April" that will clarify the AWIPS-II licensing for the Unidata community.

I hope this is the case, and if so, its a smart move by NWS and Raytheon, and the right thing to do with taxpayer's dollars.