Iris and pyugrid: Consistent access to structured and unstructured grids

With non-uniform grids becoming increasingly common in ocean and atmosphere models there is a growing need for tools which can deal with these non-uniform grids, both in isolation and in conjunction with uniform grids.

To meet this challenge, the development communities for the Iris and pyugrid Python libraries are collaborating on the addition of non-uniform grid handling within Iris. The approach taken is to provide a single, grid-independent API to enable common operations such as regional extraction, interpolation, re-gridding, statistical analysis, and visualisation.

This talk will describe the relationship between the UGRID and CF-netCDF conventions, the corresponding relationship between pyugrid and Iris, and the user experience resulting from their integration.