A Next Generation GUI for Visualizing Big Gridded Data in Python

This project aims to create a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for big gridded geospatial data visualization in the browser interface backed by the full power of the Python ecosystem. This GUI would allow controlled data points selection, massive rendering, data display, custom interaction, selection of fields for plotting and layout of widgets in the browser using Intake, Xarray and Pyviz collection of tools. Currently majority of geospatial data exploration happens in stand-alone applications like Panoply and NcView, tools that have limited functionality, do not provide complex analysis methods and can only be reasonably extended by the software developers on those projects. This new tool, written in Python, but presented as a dashboard in the notebook environment, will be extendable directly by researchers by using it in conjunction with tools like Dask and will also provide complex analysis methods on the data being visualized. It holds the promise of saving Earth Science and other researchers significant amounts of time since they can directly focus on visual data analysis and research rather than writing custom code to explore data.