ISPRS-Archives The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences ISPRS-Archives Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci. 2194-9034 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/isprs-archives-XLVIII-4-W12-2024-75-2024 XDGGS: A community-developed Xarray package to support planetary DGGS data cube computations Kmoch Alexander https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4386-4450 1 Bovy Benoit 2 Magin Justus https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4254-8002 3 Abernathey Ryan 4 5 Coca-Castro Alejandro https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9264-1539 6 Strobl Peter 7 Fouilloux Anne https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1784-2920 8 Loos Daniel https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4024-4443 9 Uuemaa Evelyn https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0782-6740 1 Chan Wai Tik 1 Delouis Jean-Marc 3 Odaka Tina https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1500-0156 3 University of Tartu, Institute of Ecology and Earth Sciences, Landscape Geoinformatics Lab, Tartu, Estonia Georode, Liege, Belgium LOPS - Laboratoire d’Oceanographie Physique et Spatiale UMR 6523 CNRS-IFREMER-IRD-Univ.Brest-IUEM, Plouzane, France Earthmover PBC, New York, NY, USA Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, Palisades, NY, USA The Alan Turing Institute, London, UK European Commission Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy Simula, Oslo, Norway Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany 20 06 2024 XLVIII-4/W12-2024 75 80 Copyright: © 2024 Alexander Kmoch et al. 2024 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLVIII-4-W12-2024/75/2024/isprs-archives-XLVIII-4-W12-2024-75-2024.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLVIII-4-W12-2024/75/2024/isprs-archives-XLVIII-4-W12-2024-75-2024.pdf

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.<br />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.