The team created the software in 2018 to fill a gap in the Python scientific ecosystem. It is the brainchild of microscopist Loïc Royer, at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub in San Francisco, California Juan Nunez-Iglesias, who develops image analysis at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and Nicholas Sofroniew, who leads the imaging-technology team at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) in Redwood City, California. Napari is a free, open-source and extensible image viewer for arbitrarily complex (‘ n-dimensional’) data that is tightly coupled to the Python programming language (see ). “One afternoon spent hacking stuff together and I already have a short visualisation of the lower and upper level Atlantic jet streams!” he tweeted in August. Using the image viewer napari, he animated the streams in 3D as they flowed over the Northern Hemisphere - usually, but not always, in sync with each other. So when it came to visualizing atmospheric blocking events, in which stationary air masses of high pressure deflect the jet stream and lead to extreme weather events, Dorrington tried an alternative approach. But compared with computerized visualizations, this ‘manual’ method is slower and “it’s not as interactive”. “You get pretty good at looking at all these cross-sections and working out what it implies,” says Dorrington, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Oxford, UK. He plots fast-moving rivers of air at different atmospheric altitudes and positions the charts side by side.

Josh Dorrington has become adept at viewing the jet streams.

Photoshop 7 key