6. Geospatial Data Analysis

This chapter becomes more specialised, focussing on ways we can interact with specifically geospatial data. This is based around three tools:

1. geopandas, an extension of pandas that introduces geospatial capability and allows you to read, manipulate, and write vector data.

2. xarray, a tool to work with multi-dimensional data typical of climate data and netCDF files.

3. rioxarray, an extension of xarray that adds additional functionality for working with raster-like gridded geospatial data.

Between geopandas/pandas and rioxarray/xarray, you will be able to ingest and manipulate nearly all relevant data you are likely to come across.

There is also an additional notebook showing an example of how we might combine these data: taking a climate dataset, applying geospatial metedata, and clipping it using vector data so that we can extract long-term time-series data over specific regions.

Section Contents

• 6.1. Vector Data (geopandas)
• 6.2. Multidimensional Data (xarray)
• 6.3. Raster Data (rioxarray)
• 6.4. A Combined Problem