Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: PolarToolkit (formerly known as Antarctic-Plots) is a Python package with the goal of making polar (i.e.Antarctic, Arctic, Greenland) research more efficient, reproducible, and accessible.The software does this by providing: 1) convenient functions for downloading and pre-processing a wide range of commonly used polar datasets; 2) tools for common geospatial tasks (i.e.changing data resolution, subsetting data by geographic regions); 3) code to easily create publication-quality maps, data profiles, and cross-sections; and 4) a means to interactively explore datasets. Statement of needA common workflow for a geospatial scientist might be: navigate to an online repository and download a dataset, place this downloaded file in a local folder on their computer, perform some preprocessing steps, such as re-projecting, or interpolating the data, possibly using tools like GMT (Wessel et al., 2019), perform their scientific analysis on the data, and then create a map with this data using a graphical user interface (GUI) application such as QGIS (QGIS Development Team, 2024).These workflows typically require many separate tools (i.e.internet browser, file browser, spatial analysis software, and mapping software), and are often manually repeated many times throughout a manuscript revision process and the scientist's career.
DOI: 10.21105/joss.06502
Author: Matthew D. Tankersley
Institutions: GNS Science, Victoria University of Wellington
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4401741881