SIParCS 2018- William "Will" Downs
William "Will" Downs, Williams College
Visualization of Time Series and 3D Spatial Data using Python
The Data Assimilation Research Testbed (DART) is an open-source community software facility for ensemble data assimilation developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). DART works with a wide variety of climate and weather models and observations, and has been free and publicly available for more than 10 years.
The DART distribution includes a variety of diagnostic tools for examining differences between observed values and predicted values from a model, as well as how assimilating observations affects a model's forecasts. Most of these tools are implemented using MATLAB scripts. While these scripts are highly configurable, they can be difficult to use for data exploration, such as selecting different observation types and times to plot. Additionally, MATLAB is a commercial product which requires a paid license to run scripts like the DART diagnostics.
Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) designed in Python provide an open-source means of quickly visualizing observation and model data. Many of the DART diagnostic tools have been successfully recreated in this user-friendly GUI format while maintaining the graphical quality produced by the original scripts.
Mentors: Jonathan Hendricks, Nancy Collins
Slides