Iris

Iris is an open source Python library for analysing and visualising meteorological and oceanographic data sets, initially developed at the Met Office.

​https://github.com/SciTools/iris Source code repository

​http://scitools.org.uk/iris/docs/latest/ Documentation

​https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/scitools-iris Users forum

​https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/scitools-iris-dev Developers forum

Iris uses ​matplotlib for graphics and ​cartopy (also from the Met Office) for mapping (replacing ​basemap).

Features

• Reads/writes netCDF, UM PP and GRIB files
• Reads UM fieldsfiles

Use on raijin

Iris 1.6 is installed on raijin under ~access/apps. To use it

module use ~access/modules
module load iris

Examples

Galley of example plots with links to scripts is here.

Issues

• cartopy dependencies make installation awkward
• Incomplete standard names and other metadata with fieldsfiles
• Inconsistent merging of fields into multidimensional variables

Comparison with cdat

Note this refers to cdat 5 rather than the new ​UV-CDAT which I haven't really tried yet.