Alternative to Cartopy

[chadhutchins182]

Hey @ahuang11 I've been working on converting xnrl to use Python Poetry and pyproject.toml. Everything is mostly ok and more testing is needed but the big hangup is using cartopy with grid lines, states, countries, etc with the notebooks and I would imagine that would carry over to the runtime.

The problem with cartopy is the system level requirements (geos and gdal) and getting a venv created each time or in a CI situation. Is there an alternative pure python library that could be used to provide those drawing features?

Thanks!

[ahuang11]

One workaround is using tile sources instead of coastlines/grid lines/states/etc), but the downside is that you need your other data projected in GOOGLE_MERCATOR https://holoviews.org/reference/elements/bokeh/Tiles.html

A suggestion is to use a Docker image with conda + cartopy (something like https://huggingface.co/spaces/ahuang11/esip-presentation-meeting/blob/main/Dockerfile but it could probably be optimized).

It also seems Cartopy maintainers have been working on removing GEOS from requirements SciTools/cartopy#2083 so it can be pip installed in the near future!

[chadhutchins182]

One workaround is using tile sources instead of coastlines/grid lines/states/etc), but the downside is that you need your other data projected in GOOGLE_MERCATOR https://holoviews.org/reference/elements/bokeh/Tiles.html

A suggestion is to use a Docker image with conda + cartopy (something like https://huggingface.co/spaces/ahuang11/esip-presentation-meeting/blob/main/Dockerfile but it could probably be optimized).

It also seems Cartopy maintainers have been working on removing GEOS from requirements SciTools/cartopy#2083 so it can be pip installed in the near future!

Thanks @ahuang11

I think I'll take the easy way out for now and move cartopy to a docs group dependency and then create a Docker container with Conda and use that to build the mkdocs for xnrl (that way the notebooks will work). With FNMOC not supporting Conda/Anaconda it's hard to stay with them even though I would rather do that!

Though if someone used xnrl to draw coastlines they would need cartopy... I guess I could make it an extra and a docs dependency.

Thoughts?
Chad

[ahuang11]

Not sure if it was a coincidence, but cartopy is now simply pip installable!!
https://github.com/SciTools/cartopy/releases/tag/v0.22.0