XDGGS: A community-developed Xarray package to support planetary DGGS data cube computations

Abstract

Traditional map projections introduce distortions, especially for global data. Discrete Global Grid Systems (DGGS) offer an alternative by dividing the Earth into equal-area grid cells at different resolutions. This paper describes xdggs, a new Xarray extension that simplifies working with DGGS. Xdggs provides a unified API for various DGGS libraries and integrates seamlessly with the Pangeo ecosystem through extending the widely used Xarray library to use the DGGS-specific cell identifiers as an index. This development makes DGGS more accessible and will lead to facilitating data analysis on a planetary scale.Xdggs aims to provide a user-friendly API that hides the implementation complexities of different DGGS libraries. And because it integrates seamlessly with Xarray, a popular tool for geospatial data analysis, xdggs promotes FAIR data practices by simplifying data access and interoperability and can become a valuable tool for geospatial scientists and application developers working with global datasets.