tropycal.recon.dropsondes

class tropycal.recon.dropsondes(storm, data=None, update=False)[source]

Creates an instance of a Dropsondes object containing all dropsonde data for a single storm.

Parameters

  • storm (tropycal.tracks.Storm) – Requested storm.

  • data (str, optional) – Filepath of pickle file containing dropsondes data retrieved from dropsondes.to_pickle(). If provided, data will be retrieved from the local pickle file instead of the NHC server.

  • update (bool) – True = search for new data, following existing data in the dropsonde object, and concatenate.

Returns

Dataset – An instance of dropsondes.

Notes

Warning

Recon data is currently only available from 2006 onwards.

There are two recommended ways of retrieving a dropsondes object. Since the ReconDataset, hdobs, dropsondes and vdms classes are storm-centric, a Storm object is required for both methods.

#Retrieve Hurricane Michael (2018) from TrackDataset
basin = tracks.TrackDataset()
storm = basin.get_storm(('michael',2018))

The first method is to use the empty instance of ReconDataset already initialized in the Storm object, which has a get_dropsondes() method thus allowing all of the dropsondes attributes and methods to be accessed from the Storm object. As a result, a Storm object does not need to be provided as an argument.

#Retrieve all dropsondes for this storm
storm.recon.get_dropsondes()

#Retrieve the raw dropsondes data
storm.recon.dropsondes.data

#Use the plot_points() method of dropsondes
storm.recon.dropsondes.plot_points()

The second method is to use the dropsondes class independently of the other recon classes:

from tropycal.recon import dropsondes

#Retrieve all dropsondes for this storm, passing the Storm object as an argument
dropsondes_obj = dropsondes(storm)

#Retrieve the raw dropsondes data
dropsondes_obj.data

#Use the plot_points() method of dropsondes
dropsondes_obj.plot_points()

Methods Summary

dropsondes.isel(index)

Select a single dropsonde by index of the list.

dropsondes.plot_points([varname, level, ...])

Creates a plot of dropsonde data points.

dropsondes.plot_skewt([time])

Plot a Skew-T chart for selected dropsondes.

dropsondes.sel([mission, time, domain, ...])

Select a subset of dropsondes by any of its parameters and return a new dropsondes object.

dropsondes.to_pickle(filename)

Save dropsonde data (list of dictionaries) to a pickle file

dropsondes.update()

Update with the latest data for an ongoing storm.