PyGMT Community Meeting, Wednesday 6 Oct 2021 (UTC 1800)

[weiji14]

The PyGMT team will be having a community meeting on Wednesday 6 October 2021 (UTC 18:00). The agenda is as follows:

1. PyGMT Release v0.5.0 plans (Release v0.5.x · GitHub)
2. Discussion about how to handle the upcoming GMT 6.3 in PyGMT v0.6.0?
3. AGU 2021 Fall Meeting poster/presentation ideas
4. etc

Main focus will be on getting a new PyGMT release out (tentatively set for 15 October 2021) and some talk on the upcoming AGU conference perhaps, but hopefully there will be time to chat about other things too.

https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=PyGMT+Community+Meeting&iso=20211006T18&p1=1440&ah=1

Meeting notes: PyGMT Community Calls 2021 - HackMD
Meeting link:

https://hawaii.zoom.us/j/99364506513

[weiji14]

2021-10-07 (UTC 18:00)

Youtube recording: https://youtu.be/xKPAP4a3Fns

Participants (please add your name):

• Meghan
• Will
• Wei Ji
• Richkard
• Claus-Peter

Agenda:

1. PyGMT Release v0.5.0 plans (https://github.com/GenericMappingTools/pygmt/projects/7)
2. Discussion about how to handle the upcoming GMT 6.3 in PyGMT v0.6.0?
3. AGU 2021 Fall Meeting poster/presentation ideas
4. Questions/comments from community members

Discussion

1. PyGMT Release v0.5.0
   • Scheduled for Friday 15 October 2021
   • Will volunteered to be the release manager!
   • Will wants to finalize all of the “Add missing aliases xxx” Pull Requests (e.g. https://github.com/GenericMappingTools/pygmt/pull/1506)
   • Will probably get the seafloor crustal age dataset done soon (https://github.com/GenericMappingTools/pygmt/pull/1471)
   • Meghan will try to open a draft PR to refactor grdinfo to not output a str, but a Python dictionary instead (https://github.com/GenericMappingTools/pygmt/issues/593), may need to have some big if-blocks
   • Stuff to postpone to the next release PyGMT v0.6.0:
     • Refactoring unit tests to not use grdinfo and moving to using xarray.testing instead of numpy.testing, which seems more exact as we can test each individual cell value, rather than just the min/max statistics
     • One function for standardized table-like outputs (pd.DataFrame, numpy.array, file). Currently only for grd2xyz. Will suggests that it’s not too hard to convert pd.DataFrame to np.array, so could just do this for v0.6.0
     • The project feature by claudiodsf (https://github.com/GenericMappingTools/pygmt/pull/1122/files), should probably help to take over after he replies. Probably several other Python reprojection functions, so not prioritized for v0.5.0
     • New datasets:
       • NASA Blue and Black Marble datasets (https://github.com/GenericMappingTools/pygmt/issues/1442), Wei Ji will need to do more work on the rioxarray side of things first to handle GeoTIFF images
       • What sample datasets should we include? May be going ahead with the seaborn model, see discussion at https://github.com/GenericMappingTools/pygmt/issues/1436.
2. Preparing for GMT 6.3
   • Tentative date for October 22, or about one week after PyGMT v0.5.0
   • Few dozen major changes, the 3 main things that will affect PyGMT are:
     • More modifiers to GMT functions (need to update PyGMT documentation too), so do we need to pin to minimum version of GMT 6.3? Probably yes, but after PyGMT v0.5.0
     • The @earth_relief dataset now has an auto-resolution feature, solely for the plotting modules and grdcut. May need to update the load_earth_relief function or something to get this feature into PyGMT.
     • Update to plotting defaults for various projections, including -JG, which may break some tests
   • GMT data server will have new SRTM15+v2.3, see https://github.com/GenericMappingTools/gmtserver-admin/issues/105
3. AGU 2021, we have a 3 min lightning talk!
   • Friday 17 Dec. 4.21pm-4.24pm EST. Meghan will be presenting virtually, and should have some material prepared by early December.
4. Questions/Comments from community members
   • Rickhard has a question about plotting graticules in the inside of the map. Hint: use pygmt.config(MAP_FRAME_TYPE="inside"). Posted at Help with displaying graticules inside the map frame.
   • Claus-Peter has a question about using PyGMT/GMT for his paleo sea-level project, basically wanting to get an idea of the PyGMT project. We will endeavour to finalize triangulate (https://github.com/GenericMappingTools/pygmt/pull/731) and gmtselect (https://github.com/GenericMappingTools/pygmt/pull/1429) for PyGMT v0.5.0 since those are two functions he mentioned.
   • To match with the high resolution SRTM dataset, DCW coastlines are not accurate enough. Meghan mentioned there is funding to update the GSSHG dataset, e.g. to associate islands to the correct countries.

[maxrjones]

Thanks, @weiji14. One additional comment regarding GMT 6.3, please feel free to post any upstream issues for PyGMT that you and/or others think are essential to fix before releasing 6.3. I’ll also look through to flag any urgent upstream issues.