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2023 ROADMAP

1. Overview

This roadmap document defines the broader GeoCAT scope with tasks and activities under scope items, then provides a high level schedule that GeoCAT will tentatively employ throughout 2023 to achieve the deliverables and milestones out of those activities.

1.1. Community involvement

GeoCAT welcomes and needs community input and feedback on this roadmap as well as development activities throughout the year. That helps us ensure we address community needs for geoscience data analysis and visualization.

1.2. GeoCAT Scope

The scope of the GeoCAT project is based on three essential objectives of the GeoCAT group:

  1. Development of geoscientific data analysis and visualization tools,
  2. Open development & community engagement,
  3. Scalability

1.3. How to read this roadmap?

Under each objective (i.e. scope item) in section 2, the main tasks on which the GeoCAT team will work on are listed (2.1.1, 2.1.2, …).

For each task, activities are also defined (i, ii, iii, …). Deliverables and/or milestones are also defined for activities when applicable.

1.4. How to give feedback & input to this roadmap?

If you’d like to provide any feedback/input about this roadmap, you can always use the GeoCAT 2023 roadmap discussion.

However, some task under GeoCAT objectives might correspond to a separate software package or GitHub asset of GeoCAT. Therefore, we will also provide links to corresponding GitHub discussions for such tasks
throughout this document, through which you can let us hear your voice about a particular part of GeoCAT.

That way, we can ensure an open community conversation, virtually about anything.

If you are not comfortable with GitHub discussions though, you can also reach out to us via our email: geocat@ucar.edu

2. Roadmap

2.1. Development of geoscientific data analysis and visualization tools

2.1.1. Project Raijin

Unless recommended otherwise in the following items, please see the UXarray 2023 Roadmap and put your Raijin inputs, if any.

  1. UXarray
    • Milestone: API redesign to satisfy both the usage requirements & specifications and to comply with the Xarray-extension best practices
    • Analysis operators development
    • Basic visualization functions development

2.1.2. GeoCAT-comp & GeoCAT-f2py

Unless recommended otherwise in the following items, please see the GeoCAT-comp & GeoCAT-f2py 2023 Roadmap and put your GeoCAT-comp & GeoCAT-f2py inputs, if any.

  1. New functionality
  2. Improvement, maintenance, and quality of life updates
    • Optimization/benchmarking (SIParCS internship)
    • Support for M1/M2 and Windows platforms
    • Documentation improvements
    • Continue to research and match community packaging standards

2.1.3. GeoCAT-examples & GeoCAT-viz

Unless recommended otherwise in the following items, please see the GeoCAT-examples & GeoCAT-viz 2023 Roadmap and put your GeoCAT-examples & GeoCAT-viz inputs, if any.

  1. New functionality
    • New examples from community requests
    • New examples from ordered list (TBD)
    • Changes to existing examples for clarity
  2. Improvement, maintenance, and quality of life updates
    • Support for mesh-based rendering
    • Interactive plots, beginning with support for time step animations
    • Changes to existing examples to keep up with dependencies

2.1.4. Project Pythia

  1. Leverage Project Pythia outreach efforts to announce releases
  2. Contribution reviews
    • Provide reviews for contributions to the Pythia assets (mostly in the form of GitHub pull-requests)
  3. Content support
    • Generate GeoCAT Cookbook(s) that show off new functionalities

2.1.5. WRF-Python

  1. User support
  2. Explore improved Xarray compatibility

2.1.6. NCL

  1. Conda installation support

2.2. Open development & community engagement

  1. Pangeo community
    • Retain GeoCAT presence at Pangeo events (e.g. weekly meetings, dev. meetings, etc.)
    • Seek increased Pangeo involvement in Raijin’s UXarray development
  2. NCAR’s ESDS (Earth System Data Science)
    • Continue GeoCAT presence at ESDS
    • Continue organizing/supporting ESDS events (e.g. weekly office hours, bi-weekly forums, annual-like tutorials, etc.)
  3. Publications & presentations
    • AGU, AMS presentations
    • GeoCAT updates, talks, tutorials, etc.
  4. Project Raijin
    • Continue Raijin & SEATS collaboration on UXarray development
    • Collaboration with NCAR’s SIMA (System for Integrated Modeling of the Atmosphere)
      • NetCDF datasets in UGRID convention
    • Seek new collaborations
  5. GeoCAT-comp & GeoCAT-f2py
    • Showcase functionality to community (examples, outreach, cross-posting, talks, etc)
  6. GeoCAT-examples & GeoCAT-viz
    • Assisting SIParCS internships for Virginia Do
    • Provide content and presentations for educational content throughout the year
  7. Project Pythia
    • Contribute to Project Pythia outreach efforts such as Python tutorials, etc.

2.3. Scalability

  1. Dask (GeoCAT-comp & UXarray)
    • Ensure compatibility & apply best practices (GeoCAT-comp SIParCS internship)
      • Investigate the existing function implementations to check if they were implemented with Dask best practices
      • Ensure it for new implementations
    • Performance analysis
      • Investigate the performance of the existing function implementations with Dask
  2. GPU programming (GeoCAT-comp & UXarray)
    • Explore