SI2-SSE: MetPy - A Python GEMPAK Replacement for Meteorological Data Analysis

GEMPAK is a legacy scripted weather analysis package used extensively in education and research within the meteorology community. The goal of MetPy is to provide a modern framework to replicate this scripted analysis functionality, but do so by leveraging the extensive, community-driven scientific Python ecosystem. To serve as a viable GEMPAK replacement, MetPy has grown many features, including support for cross-sections and added varied calculations. MetPy’s low-level infrastructure has also standardized on the use of xarray as a standard data model, as well as leveraging unit support to ensure correctness of calculations. MetPy has also developed a simplified plotting syntax that mimics the syntax of GEMPAK. This work discusses the details of these additions, including challenges encountered, as well as future plans for development as we wrap up the final year of this project.