UXarray: Extending Xarray with Support for Unstructured Grids

The arrival of kilometer-scale climate and global weather models presents substantial challenges for the analysis and visualization of the resulting data, not only because of their tremendous size but also because of their employment of unstructured grids upon which the governing equations of state are solved. Few Open Science analysis and visualization tools exist that are capable of operating directly on unstructured grid data. Those that do exist are not comprehensive in the capabilities they offer, do not scale adequately, or both. Recognizing this gap in much-needed capability, Project Raijin - funded by an NSF EarthCube award - and the DOE SEATS project, launched a collaborative effort to develop a Python package called UXarray. UXarray extends the widely used Python Xarray package, providing support for operating directly (without regridding) on unstructured grid model outputs used in the Earth System Sciences. Much like Xarray, UXarray provides fundamental analysis and visualization operators, upon which more specialized, domain-specific capabilities can be layered. Also like Xarray, UXarray follows an Open Development model, encouraging and facilitating community contributions to all aspects of the project. This talk will provide an overview of UXarray’s current capabilities, a roadmap for future development, and will describe our efforts to attract and nurture a vibrant community of project contributors.