[CLIMATE-55] Updating any modules using PyNgl and PyNio

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 0.1-incubating
• Fix Version/s: 0.1-incubating
• Component/s: metrics
• Assignee: Cameron Goodale
• Reporter: Huikyo Lee
• Created: 28/May/13 17:38
• Updated: 09/Jul/13 18:20
• Resolved: 09/Jul/13 18:07

Description

PyNgl and PyNio have some critical weaknesses as follows.
1. NCAR has not updated PyNgl and PyNio updated for a long time. They do not support full features of NCL.
2. PyNgl does not support x window plots. It only allows creating postscript files.
3. PyNio cannot delete and replace existing NetCDF files.

I suggest replacing PyNio/PyNgl with netCDF4 and mpl_toolkits.basemap.

(updated June/19/2013)
Jinwon and I found out that netCDF4 does not properly handle model data without any missing data.
Using PyNio, variables from netcdf files are stored as a numpy.ma array whereas netCDF4 just creates numpy array when there is no missing value. This caused an error because our toolkit assumes that all model data have mask information. I will fix this and commit a new revision soon.