OceanSpy: A Python package to facilitate ocean model data analysis and visualization

Abstract

OceanSpy is an open-source and user-friendly Python package that enables scientists and inter-ested amateurs to analyze and visualize oceanographic data sets. OceanSpy builds on software packages developed by the Pangeo community, in particular Xarray (Hoyer & Hamman, 2017), Dask (Dask Development Team, 2016), and Xgcm (“Xgcm,” n.d.). The integration of Dask facilitates scalability, which is important for the petabyte-scale simulations that are becoming available. 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 (Medvedev, Lemson, & Rippin, 2016), which hosts several sim-ulations and is publicly available. OceanSpy enables extraction, processing, and visualization of model data to (i) compare with oceanographic observations, and (ii) portray the kinematic and dynamic space-time properties of the circulation.