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Update README with 'What's the Deal'
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darothen committed May 5, 2017
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Expand Up @@ -12,6 +12,33 @@ pre-processing the data using GAMAP_ or IDL.
This package is maintained as part of a broader, community effort to
tackle `big data problems in geoscience <https://pangeo-data.github.io/>`_.

What's the Deal?
----------------

The `contemporary scientific Python software stack <https://speakerdeck.com/jakevdp/the-state-of-the-stack-scipy-2015-keynote>`_
provides free, powerful tools for nearly all of your data processing, analysis,
and visualization needs. These tools are `well supported <https://www.numfocus.org/>`_
by a large community of heavily invested users and developers from academia,
government, and industry. They are also developed (mostly) as part of community-based,
open-source, and user-driven projects.

For nearly any application you might have in the geosciences, you can start using this powerful,
free software stack *today* with minimal friction. However, one friction point for GEOS-Chem
users is that it is difficult to work with legacy bpch-format diagnostics files. **xbpch** solves
this problem by providing a convenient and performant way to read these files into a modern
Python-based analysis or workflow.

Furthermore, **xbpch** is 100% future-proof. In two years, when your GEOS-Chem simulations are
writing NetCDF diagnostics, you won't need to change more than a single line of code in any
of your scripts using **xbpch**. All you'll need to do is swap out **xbpch**'s function for reading
data and instead defer to it's parent package (xarray). It will *literally* take less than 10
keystrokes to make this change in your code. Plus - you'll be backwards compatible with any legacy
output you need to analyze.

So give **xbpch** a try, and let me know what issues you run in to! If we solve them once today,
they'll be solved in perpetuity, which means more time for you to do science and less time to worry
about processing data.


Installation
------------
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