pycon logo

PyCon 2011 Atlanta

March 9th–17th

Log in or Sign Up

Python Integration of Atmospheric Technology Applications at SRNL

log in to bookmark this presentaton

Novice / Poster
The Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) Atmospheric Technologies Center has evolved over several development cycles into a complex collection of legacy applications, programming languages, and commercial databases. SRNL developers in the Computational Sciences Scientific Computing group are redesigning the weather system using Python and Open Source solutions.

Abstract

The Atmospheric Technologies Group at the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) are tasked with providing continuous weather forecasting and modeling capabilities for the Savannah River Site and regional area. Software applications to support this site requirement were based on Oracle with C, PL/SQL and Fortran, plotting codes written in IDL and Fortran, and desktop applications written in Tcl/Tk. No monitoring system was available to monitor data flow between the collection stations. The Scientific Computing group in Computational Sciences is converting these disparate legacy codes to Python making use of NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib and other Python packages. Database functionality has been successfully been migrated from Oracle with C and PL/SQL to PostgreSQL with Python connector modules. A web-based dataflow monitoring system, written in Python, is in production to display graphical status reports and network alerts. As part of the new design, redundant code is being moved to a common python package that increases coding efficiency and reliability.