Origin and Purpose

icepyx is both a software library and a community composed of ICESat-2 data users, developers, and the scientific community. We are working together to develop a shared library of resources - including existing resources, new code, tutorials, and use-cases/examples - that simplify the process of querying, obtaining, analyzing, and manipulating ICESat-2 and relevant ancillary datasets to enable scientific discovery.

icepyx aims to provide a clearinghouse for code, functionality to improve interoperability, documentation, examples, and educational resources that tackle disciplinary research questions while minimizing the amount of repeated effort across groups utilizing similar datasets. icepyx also hopes to foster collaboration, open-science, and reproducible workflows by integrating and sharing resources.

Many of the underlying tools from which icepyx was developed began as Jupyter Notebooks developed for and during the cryosphere-themed ICESat-2 Hackweek at the University of Washington in June 2019 or as scripts written and used by the ICESat-2 Science Team members. Originally called icesat2py, the project combined and generalized these scripts into a unified framework, adding examples, documentation, and testing where necessary and making them accessible for everyone. icepyx is now a domain-agnostic, standalone software package and community (under the broader icesat2py GitHub organization) that continues to build functionality for obtaining and working with ICESat-2 data products locally and in the cloud. It also improves interoperability for ICESat-2 datasets with other open-source tools. Our resources guide provides additional information on both the foundational documents for icepyx and closely related libraries for working with ICESat-2 data.