Default plot_barbs to kts

[dopplerchase]

Dear Metpy developers,

While making a sounding using metpy, I discovered that skew.plot_barbs defaults to using the u and v in their units that I gave it. Can we change this to default to kts? I say this because I assumed thats what it did anyway before realizing my plots were showing wind barbs in m/s and i interpreted them as too weak. At the very least, can we add a warning to the user that the wind barbs are being plotted in m/s?

I would go out on a limb and say that most Meteorologists interpret barbs in kts anyway.

Thanks for your time and effort on the Metpy project!

Cheers, Randy

[dcamron]

Hello, and thanks for the issue! This is the behavior that's been chosen so that a user's specified inputs don't change without them knowing and making the decision to do so first. plot_barbs does have its own plot_units keyword where you can specify a unit (e.g. plot_units=units('kts')) to convert to for plotting. This default behavior and the options available for configuration are described in the docs for plot_barbs.

Of course, MetPy can change this default if there's a clear demand from the community! We can open this up for further discussion if you'd like. If this default was to change, it wouldn't happen for any Metpy 1.x release. The interface and default behaviors of MetPy's functions remain frozen as best as possible for major releases, and things only break things infrequently and with clear communication [MetPy versioning].

If there are any further ways the current behavior can be clarified for users, don't hesitate to follow up and let us know. Thanks!