For this sun simulating project I had to import height data from public databases which was encoded in geotiff files. Luckily the package OSGeo have implemented import functionalities from geotiff files and Ozak have made nice python package called georasters that are abstracting out the complexities within GDAL. However, since I had problems installing georasters and GDAL on my Mac I decided to create a docker container that would convert the tiff files into NumPy binary files. These files seem more simple to load and the NumPy library is generally widely accessible.
You should have docker installed on your system.
Clone this repository:
git clone https://github.com/harasmussen/geotiff-converter.git
cd geotiff-converter
Copy your tiff files into the data directory of the repository:
cp [path to your *.tif files] data
Then build and run the dockers:
docker build -t geotiff-converter
docker run -v $(pwd)/data:/usr/src/app/data geotiff-converter
The converted files should now be in the data folder.