PyGeode: A python package for analyzing large gridded datasets

PyGeode (code.google.com/p/pygeode/) is an open-source Python package originally developed in the Atmospheric Physics group in the Department of Physics at the University of Toronto. The package is designed to facilitate the analysis, management and visualization of large gridded datasets such as those generated by climate models. The package draws on the numerical and scientific capabilities of numpy, and scipy, and the plotting capabilities of matplotlib and some of its toolkits. The package is designed with three principles in mind. Firstly, it permits operations to be performed where ever possible in the geophysical coordinate space appropriate to the dataset, rather than the index space the underlying arrays, and handles the implied mapping automatically. Secondly, the operations are designed to work seamlessly on datasets too large to fit in memory, to simplify the analysis of very large datasets. Finally, it provides many helper methods to format and annotate matplotlib-generated figures of the data.

We present an overview of the features and design of the package, in the hopes that it may be of interest to others. Documentation for the package, including a tutorial and reference, is available.