Export and Save Boundaries

You may wish to save the boundary data contained in the various Boundary classes to a file or use it in another data format. All the Boundary classes have a to_dict() method that exports the data into two dictionaries, one that contains the boundary information and one that contains the class metadata. The dictionary may be formatted to simply hold the data using similarly-named keys or may be formatted to allow the creation of an xarray.Dataset.

ocb_data, ocb_info = ocb.to_dict()
print(ocb_info.keys(), '\n', ocb_data.keys())

This will show the following keys. Note that all of the information keys are single-value quantities that are useful for reproducibility, and the data keys directly correspond to the class attributes in OCBoundary or EABoundary that are obtained directly or calculated from the instrument boundary files.

dict_keys(['instrument', 'filename', 'hemisphere', 'min_fom', 'max_fom', 'boundary_lat'])
dict_keys(['dtime', 'phi_cent', 'r_cent', 'r', 'fom', 'year', 'soy', 'num_sectors', 'a', 'r_err'])

The DualBoundary output is slightly different, as it will contain the OCB and EAB pairs.

dual_data, dual_info = dual.to_dict()
print(dual_info.keys(), '\n', dual_data.keys())

Note that attributes pulled from each boundary have the boundary prepended to the key.

dict_keys(['eab_instrument', 'eab_filename', 'eab_min_fom', 'eab_max_fom', 'eab_boundary_lat', 'ocb_instrument', 'ocb_filename', 'ocb_min_fom', 'ocb_max_fom', 'ocb_boundary_lat', 'hemisphere', 'max_delta'])
dict_keys(['dtime', 'eab_phi_cent', 'eab_r_cent', 'eab_r', 'eab_fom', 'eab_year', 'eab_soy', 'eab_num_sectors', 'eab_a', 'eab_r_err', 'ocb_phi_cent', 'ocb_r_cent', 'ocb_r', 'ocb_fom', 'ocb_year', 'ocb_soy', 'ocb_num_sectors', 'ocb_a', 'ocb_r_err'])

You can create a netCDF file with this data using xarray.

import xarray as xr

dual_data, dual_info = dual.to_dict(xarray_style=True)
dual_dataset = xr.Dataset(dual_data, attrs=dual_info)
dual_dataset.to_netcdf('/path/to/dual_boundary.nc')