The open source community is strategically important to the UK Met Office as it strives to meet the increasing need to collaborate freely and openly in academic and commercial partnerships. The UK Met Office employs a team of software engineers to develop its scientific capabilities by contributing to the open source community. The focus of much of this effort has been on two new open source packages that build upon the functionality provided by NumPy, SciPy and matplotlib. Iris is a Python library for data analysis and visualisation within the weather, climate and ocean sciences. It implements a generalised n-dimensional gridded data model to isolate end-user code from file format specifics. The Iris data model is a result of close collaboration with the CF Data Model community. Iris has read/write support for a variety of scientific file formats including NetCDF and GRIB, as well as providing access to OPeNDAP services. Cartopy is a new mapping library that provides an intuitive interface for the transformation and visualisation of geospatial vector and raster data. Its development grew from a need to visualise data in a range of cartographic projections.
This talk will describe the UK Met Office's involvement in the open source community, include a demonstration of Iris and Cartopy, and outline areas of future development.