CMIP6 Dataset Access Made Easy: No Downloads Necessary

Pangeo has partnered with Google Cloud to bring CMIP6 climate data to Google Cloud’s Public Datasets Program. Along with making CMIP6 available on Google Cloud, the Pangeo Project develops software and infrastructure to make it easier to analyze and visualize climate data using cloud computing.

Intake-esm

Intake-esm is a data cataloging package built on top of intake,xarrays and pandas.Finding, investigating, loading these assets into data array containers such as xarray can be a daunting task due to the large number of files a user may be interested in. Intake-esm aims to address these issues by providing necessary functionality for searching, discovering, data access/loading.

Let’s get started with accessing the catalog. The following code accesses the given URL and searches for daily historical data of maximum temperature.

The CMIP6 catalog based on our search looks like this:

Now, we can read any of the listed models and perform our analysis without having to download the dataset.

We can now perform operations to select a particular domain and time period for our analysis. The following code snippet clips the South Asian domain out of the global dataset and covers the time period from 1990 to 2000.

The selected domain can then be plotted by the following line of code

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
ds_model.tasmax.isel(time=0).plot()

Conclusion

In this article, we have presented the use of intake-esm to load CMIP6 dataset and perform operations without having to download the dataset. This presents the effectiveness of using intake-esm which is specifically designed for cataloging and loading climate datasets. The utility not only provides efficient user-defined cataloging but is also very efficient in data loading by minimizing memory and processing overhead.

Overall intake-esm streamlines the process of working with climate datasets making it valuable for climate scientists and data analysts to perform quick analysis on the data.