pysteps v1.4.1

Summary

• Major refactoring of the pysteps.visualization module to improve the code quality, documentation, and coverage. As a consequence, there have been few changes in the interfaces to the plotting functionalities that will produce new deprecation warnings for v1.6 [#199]
• Fix incompatibility that appeared with scipy>=1.6 causing pysteps.nowcasts.steps.forecast to fail with argument vel_pert_method="bps" and a zero velocity field [#203]
• Fix bug introduced in v1.4.0 concerning the usage of the netcdf exporter in pysteps.nowcasts.steps.forecast [#200]
• Fix bug in pysteps.utils.cleansing.decluster [#194]

For a more comprehensive list of all changes please have a look at the release v1.4.1 Milestone.

Contributors

@aperezhortal @dnerini @pulkkins

pysteps v1.4

Summary

• Introducing the thunderstorm detection and tracking (DATing) modules [example] [doc1] [doc2] [#178]
• Introducing the RainFARM (Rebora et al. 2006) module for downscaling precipitation fields [example] [doc] [#173]
• Introducing the pysteps importers plugins [doc] [#174]
• Improving the semi-lagrangian extrapolation method [doc] [#176] [#191]
• Improving pysteps netCDF exporter [doc] [#175]
• Implementing a more general importer for ODIM-compliant data sources [doc] [#171] [#172]
• Improving plotting of basemaps [doc] [#177] [#180] [#192]

... and plenty of smaller bug fixes and general improvements. For more info please have a look at the release v1.4 Milestone.

Breaking changes

• pysteps.extrapolation.semilagrangian
  • D_prevargument renamed to displacement_prev [#184]
• pysteps.utils.images
  • pysteps.utils.images.shitomasi method migrated to pysteps.feature.shitomasi [#178]
  • pysteps.utils.images.blob method migrated to pysteps.feature.blob [#178]
• pysteps.motion.lucaskande
  • pysteps.motion.lucaskanade.track_features method migrated to pysteps.tracking.lucaskanade.track_features [#178]
• pysteps.visualization
  • map argument renamed to plot_map [#177] [#180]

Contributors

@aperezhortal @chiara-arpae @dnerini @edigiacomo @feldmann-m @jleinonen @loforest @pulkkins @RubenImhoff

pysteps v1.3.2

Summary of main changes :

• Improve documentation
• Fix bug in the VET padding
• Fix visualization routines for motion fields
• Update default pystepsrc
• Minor code adjustments and fixes

Pysteps v1.3.2 changelog:

• cascade
  • Compute cascade level statistics by default in the decomposition.decomposition_fft function.
• motion
  • Fix the issue with the padding keyword in the motion.vet function to correctly handle masked and non-masked input arrays.
• noise
  • Add a very small offset to the tapering window to avoid zero values causing some artifacts with the ssft and nested filters.
• nowcasts
  • Set out-of-domain values to nan in sprog.forecast and steps.forecast.
  • Set negative values in anvil.forecast to zero.
  • Add option to disable localization in anvil.forecast by passing ar_window_radius=None.
  • Change default to probmatching_method='cdf' in sprog.forecast.
• pystepsrc
  • Convert the value of pixelsize to km for knmi data.
• verification
  • Fix error in plot.plot_rankhist caused by a different number of ticks and tick labels.
• visualization
  • Fix interfaces in motionfields routines with respect to basemaps.plot_geography.
  • Update docstrings in motionfields.

Future Warnings:

• v1.4.0:
  • Rename keyword argument map to plot_map for all routines in the visualization module.

pysteps v1.3.1

Summary of main changes and new features:

• Add an interface to the feature.blob_* methods from scikit-image. A blob is defined as a local maximum of a Gaussian-filtered image. This new utils.images.blob_detection feature detection method can be used in the motion.lucaskanade module to track cells in radar data.
• Fix installation errors in windows which caused permissions errors in datasets.download_pysteps_data and datasets.download_mrms_data functions.
• Fix bug with the precipitation mask of nowcasts.anvil. This caused the method to produce too much rain in non-rainy areas when rain rate was used as input.
• Run Black on the whole source code for consistent, reproducible code formatting.
• Add pre-commit hooks as part of the development workflow.
• Improve documentation.

Pysteps v1.3.1 changelog:

• dataset
  • Fix permissions errors in download_pysteps_data and download_mrms_data functions
  • Update installation instructions for Windows systems
• motion.lucaskanade.dense_lucaskanade
  • Add option to use blob_detection as feature detection method
• nowcasts.anvil
  • Implement precipitation mask when rainrate is set to None
  • Minor changes to default values, masking and thresholding
• utils.images
  • Add blob_detection method

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

pysteps v1.2

Summary of main changes and new features:

• Code formatting and bug fixes
• Improve documentation and test coverage
• Implementation of advanced ARI/VARI time series models, including options for localization and differencing, as well as the estimation of the parameters by OLS
• Implementation of S-PROG and STEPS in the spectral domain for improved performance
• New importer for EUMETSAT SAF CRRI data
• Fix error during gcc installation in travis-ci for osx
• Compatibility fixes for Numpy 1.18 and pyproj 2.2.0
• Remove Basemap as optional dependency

Pysteps v1.2.0 changelog:

• cascade.decomposition:
  • add a method for recomposing the cascade
  • add option to normalize the cascade levels
  • make computation of the cascade level statistics (mean and std) optional
  • add options to choose the input and output domains: spatial or spectral
  • in addition, implement option to use compact output in the spectral domain
  • use lowercase names for the field and mask arguments
• cascade.interface:
  • modify get_method so that two functions are returned: one for decomposing and one for recomposing the cascade
• extrapolation.semilagrangian:
  • add option to specify arbitrary time steps
• motion.lucaskanade:
  • fix error when only one sparse vector is found
• noise.fftgenerators:
  • add option to choose the output domain for the noise: spatial or spectral
• nowcasts.sprog and nowcasts.steps:
  • add option to choose the domain for the computations: spatial or spectral
• nowcasts.utils:
  • remove computation of mean and std from stack_cascades
  • use utils.tapering module to compute window functions
• io.importers
  • add import_saf_crri importer
• timeseries.autoregression:
  • add VAR models
  • add OLS estimation of AR/VAR parameters
  • add localized estimation of AR/VAR parameters
  • add differencing option to compute integrated AR/VAR methods
  • use lowercase names for variables and revise docstrings
• timeseries.correlation:
  • add options for localization and differencing
  • add computation of correlation coefficients in the spectral domain
  • add method for the estimation of multivariate temporal autocorrelation
• travis:
  • run brew update-reset and brew update before installing gcc-9
• utils.spectral:
  • add methods for computing mean, standard deviation and correlation coefficient in the spectral domain
  • add option to normalize the RAPSD
• visualizations.basemaps
  • add future deprecation warning for Basemap dependency

pysteps v1.1.1

• Code formatting and bug fixes
• Implement GeoTIFF exporter
• Improve existing exporters
• Add postprocessing method to compute the band-depth of an ensemble
• Add method to merge verification objects
• Modify LK default parameters to increase the number of corners to track
• Improve documentation

pysteps v1.1

• Code formatting and bug fixes
• Refactor build system to adopt PEP517/518 standards
• Automate pytests with tox
• Add Proesmans optical flow method
• Refactor Lucas-Kanade optical flow method
• Fix bugs in vet function
• Optimize vet function
• Update io interface (odim_hdf5 -> opera_hdf5)
• Add z-r parameters to MCH, FMI and KNMI importers
• Implement FMI GeoTIFF importer
• Add new scores:
  • Normalized MSE
  • Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) score
  • F1 score (harmonic mean of precision and sensitivity)
• Implement accumulation of FSS scores from multiple forecast/observation fields
• Distinguish between type 1 and type 2 conditional biases
• Improve documentation:
  • Release guidelines

pysteps 1.0.1

Changelog for version 1.0.1:

• Bug fixes, code cleanups, and syntax improvements.
• Improve documentation.
• Implement max correlation approach for constant motion field estimation.
• Implement new outlier detection in LK.
• Implement new version of SSEPS nowcasting.
• Increase code coverage.
• Add example scripts and tutorials.

pysteps 1.0.0

Changelog for version 1.0.0:

• Change pysteps license to the less restrictive BSD-3
• Move documentation to Read the Docs (https://pysteps.readthedocs.io/)
• Include a gallery of examples
• Modify setup.py to explicitly link libraries in macOS
• Include Travis CI and Codecov
• Add test suites for interfaces, and the io and verification modules
• Remove legacy config module
• Add CONTRIBUTING.rst
• Several docstring improvements
• Add exporter for KINEROS2 Rainfall files (io.exporters module)
• Add importer for MeteoSwiss AZC radar composites (io.importers module)
• Add importer for KNMI HDF5 radar composites (io.importers module)
• Add scripts for estimating velocity perturbator parameters
• Add modules for deriving the auto-correlation function (ACF) and estimating precipitation lifetime
• Implement a separate module nowcasts.sprog for S-PROG nowcasts
• Add nowcasting module nowcasts.sseps, an experimental version of STEPS that allows for localization
• Implement interfaces for initializing and calling different FFT methods
• Rework of the extrapolation interface
• Faster implementation of the rank histogram with bug fixes
• Improve subplot handling in plot_precip_field
• Add visualization of Fourier spectra
• Rework interfaces for verification scores
• Add support for MaskedArray in motion.dense_lucaskanade
• Improve masking in nowcasts.steps module