PolarToolkit#
PolarToolkit is a Python package to make polar (i.e. Antarctic, Arctic, Greenland) research more efficient, reproducible, and accessible. The software does this by providing:
convenient functions for downloading and pre-processing a wide range of commonly used polar datasets
tools for common geospatial tasks (i.e. changing data resolution, subsetting data by geographic regions)
code to easily create publication-quality maps, data profiles, and cross-sections
a means to interactively explore datasets
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Ready for daily use but still changing.
This means that we are still adding a lot of new features and sometimes we make changes to the ones we already have while we try to improve the software based on users’ experience, test new ideas, make better design decisions, etc. Some of these changes could be backwards incompatible. Keep that in mind before you update polartoolkit to a new major version (i.e. from v1.0.0 to v2.0.0).
The PolarToolkit python package provides some basic tools to help in conducting polar research. You can use it to download common datasets (i.e. BedMachine, Bedmap, MODIS Mosaics), create maps and plots specific to Antarctica, Greenland and the Arctic and visualize data with multiple methods.
Feel free to use, share, modify, and contribute to this project.
What PolarToolkit is for:#
download commonly used datasets related to Antarctica, Greenland and the Arctic
making publication-quality maps and cross-sections, with some limited support outside of polar regions
interactively explore data and define geographic regions
plotting and working with data in projected coordinates (meters) in either EPSG 3031 or 3413, for the South and North hemispheres, respectively
mostly focused on regularly gridded (interpolated) datasets, with some support for discrete (un-gridded) data
current focus for datasets is related to ice, geophysics, and earth properties since this is where my personal research interests are, but please request or add your own types of data!
basic geospatial manipulations (filtering, resampling, reprojecting, masking etc.)
What PolarToolkit is not for:#
downloading niche datasets or those that only cover specific regions
downloaded datasets outside of Antarctica, Greenland and the Arctic
plotting and working with data in geographic (latitude and longitude) coordinates
plots not related to geospatial data
a point-and-click GUI for plotting or data exploration -> see Quantarctica or QGreenland
complex geospatial processing -> see PyGMT, Verde, Geopandas or Rasterio
How to contribute
I really welcome all forms of contribution! If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please open a discussion or issue (feature request) on the GitHub page!
Also, please feel free to share how you’re using PolarToolkit, I’d love to know.
Please, read our Contributor Guide to learn how you can contribute to the project.
Note
Many parts of this documentation was adapted from the Fatiando project.