Development roadmap

The base

The fundamental objective of xoa is to facilitate the analysis, transformation and comparison of ocean data. Facilitate here means that it must be possible to perform complex operations in a few lines, without having to know all the API and all the parameters to obtain a suitable and accurate result.

Full regridding capabilities

Extend xoa.regrid into a comprehensive regridding framework with full support for structured and unstructured grids, including curvilinear and staggered ocean model grids. All core interpolation routines will be accelerated with numba and exposed through a high-level xarray interface, so that regridding a dataset is a one-liner.

Oceanographic grid operators

Implement classical differential operators on ocean grids: vorticity, divergence, Okubo-Weiss parameter, and other derived diagnostics commonly used in physical oceanography. These operators will handle staggered grids natively and be accelerated with numba.

Graphics

Add specialized oceanographic diagram types:

• Taylor diagrams for multi-model or multi-variable skill assessment.

• Target diagrams for compact representation of model biases and root-mean-square differences.

Geographic tools

Provide more efficient geographic utilities, starting with spherical nearest-neighbour searches based on ball-tree or k-d tree structures suited for latitude/longitude coordinates. These tools will speed up operations like observation-to-model matching and spatial selection.