Reimplement the pntnc2ascii.R utility Rscript in Python.

[JohnHalleyGotway]

Describe the Enhancement

This issue arose via this METplus Discussion. The METplus team recommended that @PerryShafran-NOAA run the pntnc2ascii.R Rscript to dump the NetCDF output from PB2NC prior to interrogating that data further. That script is very useful and really helps with debugging, but it cannot be run on WCOSS or Hera due to R package dependencies.

This task is to reimplement this functionality in Python instead of R, making sure that it uses Python packages actually available on WCOSS and Hera.

The Rscript currently lives in "met/scripts/Rscripts". The python implementation could be stored in "met/scripts/python". However, I'd recommend re-evaluating the final location for this. Does it really belong in the METplus repo? Or perhaps the METdatadb repo after it's been named to METdataio? Or perhaps it does belong in MET, but should be placed in a new "met/scripts/utility" directory?

Recommend removing the old pntnc2ascii.R script once the Python version has replaced it.

Note that the majority of this work is likely already done in read_met_point_obs.py. We could just modify it to provide an option to write the observations to stdout. Or support a "-out" command line option to write the data to an output file.

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Issues should represent approximately 1 to 3 days of work.

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Funding Source

2773542

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