A community space for experimental, external, and independently maintained diagnostics built on top of the AQUA core (Application for QUality Assessment).

AQUA Friends is designed to lower the barrier for collaboration around climate diagnostics while preserving the stability and maintainability of the official AQUA ecosystem. It provides a common home for diagnostics, utilities, workflows, and analysis tools that leverage AQUA core functionalities without requiring full integration into the official AQUA releases.

AQUA has been developed within the context of the Destination Earth Programme Climate Adaptation Digital Twin (Climate DT). The nature of long-term operational framework can make direct integration of external diagnostics difficult. At the same time, AQUA is designed to allow independent usage of the core capabilities:

• data access through the Reader
• metadata fixing and homogenization
• regridding
• lazy and distributed processing with Xarray + Dask
• flexible CLI execution through aqua analysis

AQUA friends exists to bridge these two worlds.

If your diagnostic or tool:

• uses AQUA as data-access framework
• is not part of the operational framework of the ClimateDT
• does not follow coding standard or cycle releases of the ClimateDT or of the AQUA code
• is experimental or project-specific
• is not officially maintained by the AQUA team

then this organization may be the place where your repository can be developed.

AQUA friends follows a lightweight and community-driven philosophy. Each repository is:

• independently maintained
• free to choose its own dependencies and installation methods (e.g. which AQUA version to pin)
• encouraged (but not forced) to follow AQUA conventions

AQUA friends are then not forced to follow any AQUA or ClimateDT release cycle. Repositories hosted here:

• are not officially supported by the AQUA core team
• may break with future AQUA versions
• may contain experimental or unstable code
• are developed under the responsibility of their maintainers

If a diagnostic or tool proves broadly useful and sufficiently mature, the AQUA core team may collaborate with its developers to:

• improve integration with AQUA
• align APIs or metadata conventions
• optimize performance
• eventually promote parts of the code into officially supported AQUA components if this is of the original developers interest