Amherst, Massachusetts

Ryan Vandersmith

R&D software engineer building weather forecasting tools with over 10 years of full-stack development experience.

About

Software engineering meets atmospheric science

Growing up in Colorado, I became fascinated by how the atmosphere interacts with terrain and taught myself to forecast and analyze mountain waves, downslope windstorms, inversions, and severe convection. I turn that knowledge into forecast tools and open-source contributions used by photographers, storm chasers, and researchers.

Professionally, I worked on an AI website builder, led development of custom programming language tooling, and built websites as a freelance consultant.

I am looking for a role to combine my knowledge of meteorology with expertise in R&D software development.

11
Years building software: 13k+
Open source contributions: 200k+
Personal project users

Weather

Forecasting and atmospheric analysis tools

Self-taught meteorology applied through software: mesoanalysis, sounding analysis, inversion forecasting, and terrain-driven flow. Built with Python and scientific packages such as MetPy, Siphon, and Xarray, and used by photographers, storm chasers, and researchers.

Weather analysis

Mesoview

A modern, mobile-optimized interface for SPC mesoanalysis, used by storm chasers.

Open-source contribution

Stepwise CAPE/CIN

Designed and contributed an inflow layer visualization to the SounderPy sounding plot package.

Forecasting tool

Cloud Inversion Forecast

A model-driven fog and cloud inversion forecast tool used by photographers in Colorado.

Atmospheric analysis

Mountain Wave Visualization

A custom cross-section tool for analyzing mountain waves and downslope windstorms.

Community weather platform

Skychaser

A global, community-powered database for sharing, browsing, and mapping photos of clouds, storms, and other sky phenomena.

Software development

Full-stack applications and data tools

Production web applications, infrastructure, data analysis, language tooling, and research software built over a decade of professional work and personal passion.