1.3 Open source setting

Xarray, Zarr, and the Pangeo software stack

Pangeo is a community scientists, developers, and practitioners dedicated to promoting open, reproducible, and scalable science. Members of the Pangeo community develop and contribute to open-source software libraries within the geosciences and across scientific domains, including Xarray, Dask, Zarr, and Jupyter.

In addition to these software libraries, the Pangeo community emphasizes the development of educational resources (see Project Pythia), regular community meetings and showcase talks, and working groups on specialized topics.

Why open-source?

Research that follows principles of open, reproducible science is necessary in order to produce rigorous and robust scientific knowledge that can be applied to address the myriad challenges facing society in the 21st century (Gentemann [16], Tai and Robinson [49], Thöle and Wegmann [51]). In data-intensive, computational fields, open-source software and accessible data are essential elements of scientific workflows (Gil et al. [17], Ince et al. [25], Lowndes et al. [34], Wilkinson et al. [55]). We highlight publicly available data and open-source tools in order to support the goals of increasing the accessibility of and democratizing participation in scientific research, and yielding greater and more impactful scientific knowledge from earth observation datasets.