Introduction

• Unlabeled, N-dimensional arrays of numbers (e.g., NumPy’s ndarray) are the most widely used data structure in scientific computing. However, they lack a meaningful representation of the metadata associated with their data. Implementing such functionality is left to individual users and domain-specific packages. xarry expands on the capabilities of NumPy arrays, providing a lot of streamline data manipulation.

• xarray’s interface is based largely on the netCDF data model (variables, attributes, and dimensions), but it goes beyond the traditional netCDF interfaces to provide functionality similar to netCDF-java’s Common Data Model (CDM).

• xarray is a useful tool for parallelizing and working with large datasets in the geosciences.