Have you ever had to manually change your path to switch between Python 2.7 and Python 3? Have you broken your research environment by installing a new package to try? Have you ever wanted to take a snapshot and backup your current Python environment? If so, you'll love Conda environments! This week we show you how to setup your own Python environments and switch between them. We also cover how to create a file defining your environment so others can recreate it. It's another video MetPy Monday!

This week we continue setting up our Python environments by learning about Conda channels. We’ll add the Conda Forge channel and see how to install and update packages. We'll round out the screencast by using Conda to install the most recent version of Unidata's MetPy package.

Welcome to MetPy Mondays! This week we're going to start off by getting your Python environment up and running. We will install Miniconda, a product of Continuum Analytics. Conda is a Python environment and package manager that makes managing various versions of Python and packages a breeze.

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.

In this series, we work on some simpler tasks:

1. Making a line plot using matplotlib
2. Downloading a time-series of data from a THREDDS server
3. Plotting the data using matplotlib