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Overview: Why UXarray?

Overview: Why UXarray?#

UXarray aims to address the geoscience community need for tools that enable standard data analysis techniques to operate directly on unstructured grids. It extends upon and inherits from the commonly used Xarray Python package to provide a powerful and familiar interface for working with unstructured grids in Python. UXarray provides Xarray styled functions to better read in and use unstructured grid datasets that follow standard conventions, including UGRID, MPAS, SCRIP, and Exodus formats.

Unstructured Grids#

The “U” in UXarray stands for “Unstructured Grids”. These types of grids differ from typical Structured Grids in terms of complexity, requiring additional overhead to store and represent their geometry and topology. However, these types of grids are extremely flexible and scalable.

UXarray uses the UGRID conventions as a foundation to represent Unstructured Grids. These conventions are intended to describe how these grids should be stored within a NetCDF file, with a particular focus on environmental and geoscience applications. We chose to use a single convention for our grid representation instead of having separate ones for each grid format, meaning that we encode all supported unstructured grid formats in the UGRID conventions at the data loading step.

Specifically, our core functionality is build around two-dimension Unstructured Grids as defined by the 2D Flexible Mesh Topology in the UGRID conventions, which can contain a mix of triangles, quadrilaterals, or other geometric faces.

Core Data Structures#

The functionality of UXarray is built around three core data structures which provide an Unstructured Grid aware implementation of many Xarray functions and use cases.

  • Grid is used to represent our Unstructured Grid, housing grid-specific methods and topology variables.

  • UxDataset inherits from the xarray.Dataset class, providing much of the same functionality but extended to operate on Unstructured Grids. Other than new and overloaded methods, it is linked to a Grid object through the use of a class property (UxDataset.uxgrid) to provide a grid-aware implementation. An instance of UxDataset can be thought of as a collection of Data Variables that reside on some Unstructured Grid as defined in the uxgrid property.

  • UxDataArray similarly inherits from the xarray.DataArray class and contains a Grid property (UxDataArray.uxgrid) just like UxDataset.

Core Functionality#

In addition to providing a way to load in and interface with Unstructured Grids, we also aim to provide computational and analysis operators that directly operate on Unstructured Grids.

The list of currently implemented operators can be found in the User API documentation.

Get involved in the Prioritization of Uxarray analysis operators to be released in the future!

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