What’s New

Releases

v1.3.2 (February 2019)

  • Release 1.3.2
  • Coordinate name index positions are no longer assumed and are searched instead. Some users use xarray to rewrite WRF output files, and xarray might reorder the coordinate name positions.
  • Fixed a segfault issue with CAPE when more than 150 vertical levels are used (e.g. LES runs).
  • setup.py will now bootstrap the numpy installation (thanks bbonenfant!).

v1.3.1 (January 2019)

  • Release 1.3.1
  • Added the ompgen template file to the manifest.

v1.3.0 (December 2018)

  • Release 1.3.0
  • Fixed FutureWarning issue with destag routine (thank you honnorat!)
  • Fixed computational problems with updraft_helicity, and values are no longer scaled by 1000.
  • Removed version constraints for wrapt and setuptools.
  • Fixed xarray being a hard dependency.
  • Fixed unit issues with vinterp when pressure values are extracted below ground. Also added support for height fields in km and pressure fields in hPa. The documentation has been improved.
  • Fixed the smooth2d routine so that it actually works. It never worked correctly before (nor did it work in NCL). Users can now specify the center weight of the kernel and the documentation has been updated to describe how it works.
  • Fixed the storm relative helicity algorithm so that it works in the southern hemisphere. The raw algorithm now requires latitude input if used in the southern hemisphere, otherwise the northern hemisphere is assumed.
  • Fixed an issue with the latest version of cartopy 0.17 (thanks honnorat!)
  • Fixed an issue where invalid keyword arguments weren’t throwing errors when extracting standard WRF variables.
  • Fixed minor issues related to moving nests when using line interpolation and vertical cross sections. It is still an error to request all times when using lat/lon coordinates with a moving nest, but otherwise knows how to run when all times are requested. This never really worked quite right.
  • Removed the pyf file from setup.py since it is generated via the build system.
  • Added an autolevels parameter for the vertical cross section so that users can specify the number of vertical levels to use if they don’t want to specify them manually.
  • The interplevel routine has been improved. Users can now specify a single level, multiple levels, or a 2D array (e.g. PBLH) to interpolate to. Performance has been improved when interpolating a multiple product field like wspd_wdir.
  • Products that produce multiple outputs can now have the outputs requested individually. See Table of Subproduct Diagnostics for a list of what is available.
  • Much of this version of wrf-python has been back ported to NCL in the upcoming 6.6.0 release. The diagnostics should produce the same results in both packages.
  • Now released under the Apache 2.0 license.

v1.2.0 (May 2018)

  • Release 1.2.0
  • Previous versions of wrf-python promoted the strings used in xarray (e.g. name, attributes) to Unicode strings for Python 2.7. This caused problems when porting examples for PyNGL to use wrf-python in Python 3.x. All strings are now the native string type for the Python version being used. While this change should be transparent to most users, any users that worked with the xarray name or attribute values on Python 2.7 may run in to string related errors, so we’ve decided to bump the major version number.

v1.1.3 (March 2018)

  • Release 1.1.3
  • Fixed/Enhanced the cloud top temperature diagnostic.
    • Optical depth was not being calculated correctly when cloud ice mixing ratio was not available.
    • Fixed an indexing bug that caused crashes on Windows, but should have been crashing on all platforms.
    • Users can now specify if they want cloud free regions to use fill values, rather than the default behavior of using the surface temperature.
    • Users can now specify the optical depth required to trigger the cloud top temperature calculation. However, the default value of 1.0 should be sufficient for most users.
  • Added ‘th’ alias for the theta product.
  • Fixed a crash issue related to updraft helicity when a dictionary is used as the input.
  • Dictionary inputs now work correctly with xy_to_ll and ll_to_xy.
  • The cape_2d diagnostic can now work with a single column of data, just like cape_3d.

v1.1.2 (February 2018)

  • Release 1.1.2
  • Fix OpenMP directive issue with cloud top temperature.

v1.1.1 (February 2018)

  • Release 1.1.1
  • Added script for building on Cheyenne with maxed out Intel settings, which also required a patch for numpy.distutils.
  • Fixed a few unicode characters hiding in a docstring that were causing problems on Cheyenne, and also building the docs with Sphinx on Python 2.x.
  • Fix issue with np.amax not working with xarray on Cheyenne, causing an error with the mdbz product.
  • Fix cape_2d private variable bug when running with multiple CPUs.

v1.1.0 (January 2018)

  • Release 1.1.0
  • Computational routines now support multiple cores using OpenMP. See Using OpenMP for details on how to use this new feature.
  • The CAPE routines should be noticeably faster, even in the single threaded case (thank you supreethms1809!).
  • wrf.getvar() now works correctly with non-gridded NetCDF variables
  • The cloud fraction diagnostic has changed:
    • Users can now select their own cloud threshold levels, and can choose between a vertical coordinate defined as height (AGL), height (MSL), or pressure.
    • The default vertical coordinate type has been changed to be height (AGL). This ensures that clouds appear over mountainous regions. If you need the old behavior, set the vert_type argument to ‘pressure’.
    • Fixed a bug involving the cloud threshold search algorithm, where if the surface was higher than the threshold for a cloud level, the algorithm would use whatever was there before (uninitialized variable bug). This caused some interesting visualization issues when plotted. Now, whenever the surface is above a cloud level threshold, a fill value is used to indicate that data is unavailable for that location.
  • The cartopy object for LambertConformal should now work correctly in the southern hemisphere.
  • Fixed a bug with the PolarStereographic projection missing a geobounds argument (thank you hanschen!).
  • Renamed the modules containing the ‘get_product’ routines used by wrf.getvar() to avoid naming conflicts with the raw computational routine names. Users should be using wrf.getvar() instead of these routines, but for those that imported the ‘get_product’ routines directly, you will need to modify your code.
  • Fixed a uniqueness issue with the internal coordinate cache that was causing crashes when input data is changed to a different file in a jupyter notebook cell.
  • Added code to better support building wheels on Windows (thank you letmaik!)
  • Improved support for scipy.io.netcdf objects.
  • Added a new ‘zstag’ diagnostic that returns the height values for the vertically staggered grid.
  • A DOI is now available for wrf-python. Please cite wrf-python if you are using it for your research. (See Citation)
  • Fixed issue with vertcross and interpline not working correctly when a projection object is used. Users will now have to supply the lower left latitude and longitude corner point.
  • Beginning with numpy 1.14, wrf-python can be built using the MSVC compiler with gfortran. WRF-Python can now be built for Python 3.5+ on services like AppVeyor.

v1.0.5 (September 2017)

  • Release 1.0.5
  • Reduced the CI test file sizes by half.

v1.0.4 (September 2017)

  • Release 1.0.4
  • Fix warnings with CI tests which were caused by fill values being written as NaN to the NetCDF result file.
  • Added the __eq__ operator to the WrfProj projection base class.
  • Fixed array order issue when using the raw CAPE routine with 1D arrays.

v1.0.3 (June 2017)

  • Relase 1.0.3
  • Fixed an issue with the cartopy Mercator subclass where the xlimits were being calculated to the same value (or very close), causing blank plots.

v1.0.2 (May 2017)

  • Release 1.0.2
  • Fixed issue with the wspd_wdir product types when sequences of files are used.

v1.0.1 (March 2017)

  • Release 1.0.1
  • Fixed issue with initialization of PolarStereographic and LatLon map projection objects.
  • Fixed issue where XTIME could be included in the coordinate list of a variable, but the actual XTIME variable could be missing. NCL allows this, so wrf-python should as well.

v1.0.0 (March 2017)

  • Release 1.0.0.
  • Fixed issue with not being able to set the thread-local coordinate cache to 0 to disable it. Also, the cache will now correctly resize itself when the size is reduced to less than its current setting.
  • Fixed an issue with the ‘0000-00-00 00:00:00’ time used in geo_em files causing crashes due to the invalid time. The time is now set to numpy.datetime64(‘NaT’).
  • Fixed issue with wrf.cape_3d not working correctly with a single column of data.