Introducing students to scientific Python for atmospheric science

Within the geoscience community, enthusiasm for the scientific Python ecosystem continues to grow (Nagpal and Gabrani 2019). As software tools created with Python continue to emerge and mature, researchers and educators are able to leverage their knowledge of the language to tackle problems from processing Earth observation data (Raspaud et al. 2018) to weather analysis (Blumberg et al. 2017). The success and growth of the American Meteorological Society’s Symposium on Advances in Modeling and Analysis Using Python -- which debuted at the January 2010 AMS Annual Meeting (Lin 2012) -- is a good indicator of the continuing adoption of Python tools in the AMS community. Enthusiasm for the Python scientific ecosystem was especially apparent among students at the 2020 AMS Annual Meeting, with undergraduate and graduate students playing significant roles in organizing and conducting Python-focused events. Of special interest was a large workshop conducted as part of the 19th Annual AMS Student Conference, which brought together roughly 140 students for a 90-min hands-on course focused on providing an introduction to Python for the atmospheric sciences (Fig. 1).