UXarray: Extensions to Xarray to support 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 the employment of unstructured grids upon which the governing equations of state are solved. Few Open Source analysis and visualization software 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 an open source Python package called UXarray. 

UXarray extends the widely used Xarray package, providing support for operating directly (without regridding) on unstructured grid model outputs found in the Earth System Sciences, such as CAM-SE, MPAS, SCRIP, UGRID, and in the future, ICON. Much like Xarray, UXarray provides fundamental analysis and visualization operators, upon which more specialized, domain-specific capabilities can be layered. This talk will present an overview of the current capabilities of UXarray, provide a roadmap for near term future development, and will describe how the Pangeo community can contribute to this on-going effort.