Almansi, M., R. Gelderloos, T. W. N. Haine, A. Saberi, and A. H. Siddiqui (2019). OceanSpy: A Python package to facilitate ocean model data analysis and visualization. Journal of Open Source Software, 4(39), 1506, doi: https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01506
Abstract
OceanSpy is an open-source and user-friendly Python package that enables scientists and interested amateurs to analyze and visualize ocean model datasets. OceanSpy builds on software packages developed by the Pangeo community, in particular xarray, dask, and xgcm. The integration of dask facilitates scalability, which is important for the petabyte-scale simulations that are becoming available.
Simulations of ocean currents using numerical circulation models are becoming increasingly realistic. At the same time, these models generate increasingly large volumes of model output data, making the analysis of model data harder. Using OceanSpy, model data can be easily analyzed in the way observational oceanographers analyze field measurements.
OceanSpy can be used as a standalone package for analysis of local circulation model output, or it can be run on a remote data-analysis cluster, such as the Johns Hopkins University SciServer system, which hosts several simulations and is publicly available.