Hi all, Being able to account for subregions will be a crucial part of running an evaluation and making the right plots as part of our OCW refactoring. Mike and I had a discussion last Friday on some ways to do this and we both thought that the best approach would make use of the Dataset class somehow. Some specific ideas we had include:
1) Designate datasets as subregional by convention. Specifically, this could be something like making a new dataset instance with the same name as the parent dataset but with the subregion name appended to the end with a leading underscore (eg name_R01, name_R02). 2) Values for a particular subregion could placed in a list or dictionary as an attribute of Dataset. 3) Make a subclass of Dataset explicitly for subregions. In general, any approach will add an additional complication to some component of the new OCW code in that the evaluation results / datasets need to get grouped together by subregion. My preferred approach is (3) since it adds the least amount of complication to the plotting. I particularly don't like (1) since enforcing a rule by convention would add restrictions to users on valid names for datasets, for example a dataset name like 'TRMM_hourly_precip' would make it difficult to incorporate subregions. Mike, my memory since our last meeting is a bit fuzzy so please clarify or correct any of my points if I am wrong here. I would like to hear other ideas or opinions as to the best approach for the subregion problem. Thanks, Alex -- Alex Goodman
