Use cube_helper (MO developed iris module) in ESMValTool?

[tpalmer42]

It is time consuming to preprocess many CMIP models in IRIS due to mis-matches in the met data between files. This is a module that was developed at the Met Office to assist with these problems and make the preprocessing of CMIP data in IRIS easier.

Would you be able to help out?
I may be able to help out with the implementation. The code is publicly available here:

https://github.com/MetOffice/cube_helper

tamzin.palmer@metoffice.gov.uk

[Peter9192]

@bouweandela I was wondering if you see any use cases for this. One concrete thing I can think of is that it might help with preparing the cubes for the multi-model statistics preprocessor. But there might be more parts of the code where it could be useful.

[bouweandela]

@tpalmer42 Thanks for contacting us! cube_helper looks like very nice and useful Python module, it contains a lot of functionality that we have also implemented in the ESMValCore package, which is what use use to run the scientific recipes and diagnostics available in the ESMValTool package.

I'm not sure I understand what you would like to achieve with this issue though. Could you explain that in a bit more detail? Are you recommending that we use the iris_helpers package?

[tpalmer42]

@bouweandela @Peter9192 So I use the cube_helper for preprocessing CMIP data when I want to create 20 - 50 year averages and other general statistics in IRIS that require me to concatenate a lot of cubes from a number of files. IRIS is very strict (as Im sure you know) and this deals with things like metadata mismatches. Im not familiar with the ESMValTool code so I don't know if you have modules that can already achieve the same thing? This was recently developed at the Met Office because people were spending a lot of time writing individual code just to get the cubes to concatenate. When we were discussing this at a recent meeting I thought it was worth suggesting incase it could be useful more widely?

[bouweandela]

Thanks! At the moment I think we have pretty much the same code (and quite a bit more), but it looks like a very useful library so it would be good to keep it in mind for the future, maybe we could replace some of our code by using this library. I will move this issue to the ESMValCore repository because that is where most of the code for doing these kind of things lives.