Open source software for ocean phenology indices

Ocean phenology indices have been an emerging topic and closely linked as a environmental application of satellite derived essential climate variables (ECVs) to describe the ocean variability in a changing world. In a project to implement a set of coherent ocean phenology indices and best practices to calculate them, a software engineering team at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has developed an open source python software module to calculate satellite-based marine phenology products for the National Climate Assessment.

Primarily prototyped on Sea Surface Temperature (SST) measurements from a number of Level 4 datasets over the North Atlantic Ocean it has been extended to handle any region of the world’s oceans. Typical metrics includetrend analysis of SST, start and end days of summer, peak of spring transition etc., with user defined configuration files determining metric thresholds or criteria. In addition to SST, some explorations have been made with long time series ocean color and other datasets.