Basic

Climix is a tool to calculate climate indices. We focus on high performance for the efficient calculation of indices in large datasets, such as long simulations performed by high-resolution global or regional climate models, and on high-quality metadata, maximizing re-use and utility of these computations.

For now, we always base our calculations on daily input, though an extension to sub-daily input for specialized indices, or monthly input for long-running datasets with limited data availability may be considered in the future.

Getting started

Install

If you already have an installed version of Climix available, you can move on to Calculating a first index.

The easiest way to install Climix is using the Conda-forge distribution.

Conda-forge (recommended)

To install Climix from Conda-forge, you use the Conda package manager or its faster sibling Mamba. If you don’t already have a version of Conda or Mamba available to you, the best way to get started is by installing Mambaforge, an installer for Mamba that will pre-configure your installation to use the Conda-forge distribution.

Tip

If you prefer to use Conda instead of Mamba, for example because this has been pre-installed for you, just replace mamba with conda in the following commands.

To install the latest version of Climix, just create an environment with the climix package in it by running

mamba create -n my-climix climix

where my-climix is an arbitrary name you choose.

To use Climix at any time, you need to make sure that the my-climix environment is activated. To do that, any time you want to use climix execute

mamba activate my-climix

Calculating a first index

As a first example, let’s calculate the index cdd or consecutive dry days. This index is based on precipitation, which we provide to Climix in the form of a Netcdf file. Climix works with a wide variety of these files which are commonly used for climate and earth data. Here, we use pr.nc as a standin, try to run the program with a precipitation data file of your choosing, for example from CMIP6.

climix -x cdd -o cdd.nc pr.nc

Climix will store the result in a new Netcdf file in the current working directory. You can specify the name with the -o option as we did above, or you can let Climix choose a filename. You select the index you want to calculate with the -x option. For an overview of the available indices, have a look at Available Climate Indices or use the call climix -x list.

For more information about available commandline options, have a look at the help available via climix -h.