1. Overview

1.1. Purpose and Organization of the User’s Guide

The goal of this User’s Guide is to provide basic information for users of METcalcpy. METcalcpy is a stand-alone package and a Python version of the statistics calculation functionality of METviewer, METexpress, and plotting packages in METplotpy.

The METcalcpy User’s Guide is organized as follows. An overview of METcalcpy can be found below. The guide also includes details about the integrated logging capabilities, vertical interpolation information for performing pressure to height conversions for TC-RMW data, information for converting the Difficulty Index, how to calculate aggregation statistics and confidence intervals, how to use a script that will compute the observation input and total number of observations writing an output file in MET’s Matched Pair (MPR) format, and technical documentation for various diagnostic calculations in METcalcpy.

1.2. The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC)

METcalcpy has been developed, and will be maintained and enhanced, by the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC; http://www.dtcenter.org/ ). The main goal of the DTC is to serve as a bridge between operations and research, to facilitate the activities of these two important components of the numerical weather prediction (NWP) community. The DTC provides an environment that is functionally equivalent to the operational environment in which the research community can test model enhancements; the operational community benefits from DTC testing and evaluation of models before new models are implemented operationally. METcalcpy serves both the research and operational communities in this way - offering capabilities for researchers to test their own enhancements to models and providing a capability for the DTC to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of advances in NWP prior to operational implementation.

METcalcpy will also be available to DTC visitors and to the modeling community for testing and evaluation of new model capabilities, applications in new environments, and so on.

1.3. Future Development Plans

METcalcpy is an evolving software package. New capabilities are planned in controlled, successive version releases. Bug fixes and user-identified problems will be addressed as they are found. Plans are also in place to incorporate new capabilities and options in future releases of METcalcpy.

1.4. User Support

METcalcpy is one component of the larger METplus system for which user support is provided through the METplus GitHub Discussions Forum, as described in the METplus User’s Guide.