ECMWF launches earthkit 1.0 for next-generation weather and climate workflows

Announcements
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1

We are pleased to announce the release of earthkit 1.0, a major milestone for ECMWF’s open-source Python ecosystem for weather, climate, and Earth system data workflows. The release provides users with a stable and interoperable set of tools for accessing, processing, analysing, and visualising meteorological, hydrological and climate data.

What is earthkit?

ECMWF’s earthkit is a collection of Python libraries that can be used independently or combined into complete workflows.
The ecosystem is designed to simplify working with Earth system data while maintaining compatibility with widely used scientific Python tools.

The core components included in the 1.0 release are:

These tools help users build workflows ranging from exploratory research and data analysis to operational applications.

Why is version 1.0 important?

The 1.0 release marks the point at which the core interfaces are considered stable.
This should give the users greater confidence when developing applications and workflows, as compatibility will be maintained throughout the 1.x release series, reducing the risk of unexpected disruptions caused by interface changes.

For organisations and researchers planning long-term developments around ECMWF data and services, this stability milestone is particularly significant.

Getting started

The earthkit ecosystem is fully open source and available through the project website and documentation:

ECMWF training courses are also increasingly using earthkit as the recommended software ecosystem for working with ECMWF data.

Discussion

We welcome feedback from the community. If you have already started using earthkit, feel free to share:

  • Your use cases and workflows
  • Migration experiences from previous tools
  • Questions about installation or package selection
  • Suggestions for future development

For more details about the release, see the ECMWF announcement: ECMWF launches earthkit 1.0

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I personally do not use this tool (approach? system? library?), and there are several reasons why.

  1. To use it, I must use Python… Well, I’m still in R… Need to refresh my Python skills just to use earthkit? I already have the full set of libraries in R, so why?
  2. As a scientist, I need not choose between tulips, specifications of strange parameters or whatever. Instead, I need the data in response to “give me mean temperature for the rectangle with lat/lon over 50 years”. Without overcomplication.
  3. In the modern world, there are simple REST API which can be easily called from any tool.