Become units agnostic about pymagicc HOT 12 OPEN

I have used the cfunits package before. It was super easy to integrate. The downside is that it requires the udunits library as an additional dependency.

It is used in https://github.com/NCAR/wrf-python to convert units

from pymagicc.

Pinging @AnnisG as well ...

The main problem is, that there is no accepted, widely used unit solution for Python/Pandas ...

The question is how far from core MAGICC we want to move away ... such functionality might also be something for a generalised SCM wrapper which handles scenarios with arbitrary units and allows calling different SCMs.

from pymagicc.

I looked into pint because it has o called "contexts" which allow different conversions depending on the context. This is needed if we want to be able to convert under different GWPs. as of today I actually got custom built contexts to work,but so far I've only tested an example and not emissions conversion under different GWPs. But it should in general work. Most of the units would have to be added though, as the gas needs to by part of the unit. (so the unit would be e.g. GgCH4 not just Gg).

from pymagicc.

Cool, did you also take a look at https://github.com/yt-project/unyt ?

from pymagicc.

from pymagicc.

from pymagicc.

Any progress here team? It would be good to know so we can start to build https://github.com/openclimatedata/openscm/ in a units agnostic way

ping @chrisroadmap

from pymagicc.

alright I think we're on the road to somewhere hgrecco/pint#671

from pymagicc.

@chrisroadmap @JGuetschow what are the right units to be using for emissions? Mass per unit time? Or molar mass per unit time to allow easier conversion between e.g. C and CO2?

from pymagicc.

Mass per unit time is what FAIR uses. Implicitly at the moment as the "per year" part is not specified and an annual timestep is used. For all GHGs except CO2 and N2O there's no conversion to worry about as the emitted compounds are the same as the ones that appear in the concentration and radiative forcing calculations. It would be good for units to be defined by the user on input so that any required conversion can be performed before applying to the forward model.

from pymagicc.

from pymagicc.

Should be solved by moving to using the openscm API

from pymagicc.