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FOREWORD

When I first met the author a few years ago, she was eager to become more involved in the Joint Polar Satellite System’s Proving Ground. The Proving Ground by definition assesses the impact of a product in the user’s environment; this intrigued Rebekah because as a product developer, she wanted to understand the user’s perspective. Rebekah worked with the National Weather Service to demonstrate how satellite‐derived atmospheric temperature and water vapor soundings can be used to describe the atmosphere’s instability to support severe weather warnings. Rebekah spent considerable time with users at the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, to understand their needs, and she found their thirst for data and the need for data to be easily visualized and understandable. This is where Rebekah leveraged her expert skills in Python to provide NWS with the information they found to be most useful. Little did I know at the time she was writing a book.

As noted in this book, a myriad of Earth‐observing satellites collect critical information of the Earth’s complex and ever‐changing environment and landscape. However, today, unfortunately, all that information is not effectively being used for various reasons: issues with data access, different data formats, and the need for better tools for data fusion and visualization. If we were able to solve these problems, then suddenly there would be vast improvements in providing societies with the information needed to support decisions related to weather and climate and their impacts, including high‐impact weather events, droughts, flooding, wildfires, ocean/coastal ecosystems, air quality, and more. Python is becoming the universal language to bridge these various data sources and translate them into useful information. Open and free attributes, and the data and code sharing mindset of the Python communities, make Python very appealing.

Being involved in a number of international collaborations to improve the integration of Earth observations, I can certainly emphasize the importance of working together, data sharing, and demonstrating the value of data fusion. I am very honored to write this Foreword, since this book focuses on these issues and provides an excellent guide with relevant examples for the reader to follow and relate to.

Dr. Mitch Goldberg Chief Program Scientist NOAA-National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service June 22, 2020