pysteps v1.3

Summary of main changes and new features:

• Code formatting and bug fixes.
• Improve documentation and test coverage.
• New deterministic nowcasting module nowcasts.anvil implementing the ANVIL method published in Pulkkinen et al. (2020): Nowcasting of Convective Rainfall Using Volumetric Radar Observations. Learn how to use it in this example script.
• New importer io.importers.import_mrms_grib for the for NSSL’s Multi-Radar/Multi-Sensor System (MRMS).
• New dataset module to facilitate downloading the pysteps example data and create the configuration file.
• New interactive notebook my_first_nowcast.ipynb available on Google Colab.

Pysteps v1.3.0 changelog:

• dataset
  • add function download_pysteps_data to download the example data from the pysteps-data GitHub repo
  • add function create_default_pystepsrc to create a default configuration file pointing to the local pysteps data directory
  • add helper functions to easily load the example data for each data source (fmi, mch, opera, etc)
• io.importers:
  • add function import_mrms_grib to import NSSL’s Multi-Radar/Multi-Sensor System (MRMS) grib data
  • change spatial units from meters to kilometers in import_knmi_hdf5 and fix definition of y1and y2 parameters in the metadata.
  • allow all the importers to specify the output array data type (dtype keyword) and fill invalid data with a predefined value (fillna keyword)
  • add function to safely and consistently get the rain/no rain threshold
• motion.constant
  • constantmethod returns two-dimensional advection field instead of one motion vector
• motion.lucaskanade
  • fix bug in dense_lucaskanade handling of MaskedArrays inputs. Previously, the method ignored the input mask, unless the masked values where set as nans
  • require ndarrays or MaskedArrays as input data to dense_lucaskanade
• motion.vet
  • fix bug in vet keywords handling. Previously, the method argument passed to the minimizer was ignored
• nowcasts
  • add deterministic nowcasting module nowcasts.anvil
• utils.dimensions
  • include option trim in aggregate_fields function to allow aggregation along axes that are not perfectly divisible by a given window
• utils.images
  • rename ShiTomasi_detection function to lowercase shitomasi_detection to comply with PEP8
  • change default value for the buffer_mask argument in the shitomasi_detection function from 0 to 5 to provide a minimum buffer to no-data in the motion.lucaskanade.dense_lucaskanade method
• utils.interpolate
  • change default value for the epsilon argument in the rbfinterp2d function from 5 to 10 to provide a more localized interpolation of motion vectors in the motion.lucaskanade.dense_lucaskanade method

Contributors to this release:
@aperezhortal @dnerini @pulkkins @RubenImhoff