Welcome to MetPy Mondays, the Unidata Program Center's weekly series on using the Python programming language in the atmospheric and related sciences. Join your host (and UPC developer) John Leeman, along with a rotating cast of other Python developers, for a series of short blog posts and videos on using Python to get your science done.

The series, hosted over on the Unidata Developer's blog, will bring you bite sized tutorials (always less than 10 minutes) with tips, tricks, and advice on getting up and running with Unidata Python software. The first (released on July 3, 2017) and second (released today) installments deal with installing and using the Python environment and package manager Conda. Future installments will tackle topics like dealing with unit conversion in MetPy, making maps, and displaying satellite data.

You may have noticed that Unidata Program Center developer Ryan May spends a bit of his time evangelizing the use of the Python language in the atmospheric sciences. This week he appears over on Johnny Lin's PyAOS (Python for the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences) blog, weighing in on the future of AOS Python.

Ryan's post, titled “What's needed for the Future of AOS Python? Get Involved!,” lays out the case for widespread community involvement in AOS Python projects.

The Unidata Program Center is hiring! We are looking for a scientific software developer to join our team in creating and maintaining software and data services to support the geosciences.

We are looking for a software developer to help us help our community of scientists bridge the gaps between data servers, desktop scientific visualization packages like the Integrated Data Viewer, and “notebook”-style workflows (think Jupyter notebooks). We'll be integrating existing tools with new technologies to help scientists streamline the process of finding and analyzing data. At the Unidata Program Center, you'll have a chance to work with a great team in-house and an enthusiastic open source community.

The University of Wisconsin, Madison will be hosting a three-day Unidata Regional Software Training Workshop June 5-7, 2017, with an optional hackathon following on June 8. Unidata software developers will be leading the Python-focused workshop, which will cover the use of the MetPy and Siphon packages in the context of atmospheric science and introduce the National Weather Service's Common AWIPS Visualization Environment (CAVE) along with Python tools for working with AWIPS data services. A basic familiarity with Python is assumed — check out the Unidata Online Python Training for a refresher.

Unidata holds regional workshops in part to facilitate easy access to software training for those who may not be able to travel to training workshops held at the Unidata Program Center in Boulder, Colorado. Attendance is explicitly not limited to University of Wisconsin students and staff; we encourage those within easy travel distance to consider attending.

MetPy 0.5.1 has been released, addressing some issues in 0.5.0. For full release notes see the GitHub Release Page.