windspharm interfaces¶
windspharm uses different interfaces to work with different kinds of input data.
Descriptions of each interface are below, and are summarised in the following table:
| Interface | Description |
|---|---|
| iris | Data contained in an iris cube. |
| xarray | Data contained in an xarray.DataArray. |
| cdms | Data stored in a cdms2 variable. |
| standard | Other data, stored in a numpy.ndarray. |
Iris interface¶
The iris interface works with Cube objects, which are the data containers used by the iris data analysis package.
The meta-data, including coordinate dimensions, associated with iris Cube objects is understood by the windspharm.iris.VectorWind interface.
The outputs of windspharm.iris.VectorWind methods are also contained in Cube objects, meaning they can be used with tools in the iris package, and easily written to a file.
xarray interface¶
The xarray interface works with DataArray objects.
The coordinate metadata of DataArray is interpreted by the windspharm.xarray.VectorWind interface, and the outputs of the windspharm.xarray.VectorWind methods are contained in DataArray objects allowing their use with othe tools from the xarray package.
cdms interface¶
The windspharm.cdms.VectorWind interface works with cdms2 variables, which are the core data container used by UVCDAT. A cdms2 variable has meta-data associated with it, including dimensions, which are understood by the windspharm.cdms.VectorWind interface. The outputs of windspharm.cdms.VectorWind methods are cdms2 variables with meta-data, which can be written straight to a netCDF file using cdms2, or used with other parts of the UVCDAT framework.
standard interface¶
The standard interface works with numpy arrays, which makes the standard interface the general purpose interface. Any data that can be stored in a numpy.ndarray can be analysed with the windspharm.standard.VectorWind interface.