I am pleased to announce that AWIDS pre-alpha 1.0.0 has been released for public use! For those of you who are just joining, AWIDS is a program I have been building in Python to view meteorological data and plot it on a map. AWIDS stands for Advanced Weather Interactive Diagnostic System, a play on the acronym for the AWIPS program. Right now AWIDS displays surface METAR data – temperature, dewpoint, wind, theta, theta-e, vorticity, divergence, and more. AWIDS is built on several packages, including MATPLOTLIB, NUMPY, and SCIPY. These packages are REQUIRED in order for the program to run properly. Otherwise, you’ll get a lot of unhealthy error messages. Links to the external packages are included in the README.
To download AWIDS, head over to my GitHub (link: https://github.com/keltonhalbert/AWIDS ) and click on the ZIP button (highlighted in the image above). Installation instructions, information about the program, and instructions on how to run the program are all included in the README. Be sure to read it thoroughly before emailing me with bugs/issues!
This is an un-documented pre-alpha release. For programmers interested on building on top of this package, I’d recommend waiting before modifying the package. The next release should include thorough documentation, and many other significant changes to code structure as things are reworked to be more efficient. My hope, however, is that a public release will allow for other programmers to add their suggestions, report bugs, and make the program better as a whole. Feel free to contact me with bugs, reports, suggestions, or success stories!
