climaclass 0.2.0

Classical climate classification (Koppen-Geiger, Holdridge, Thornthwaite) from monthly climatologies - pure Python, no Earth Engine required.

climaclass

Classical climate classification from monthly climatologies — pure Python, no Earth Engine required.

climaclass turns a 12-month climatology of temperature and precipitation into a climate class under three classical schemes:

Scheme	Reference	Output
Köppen–Geiger	Peel et al. (2007); legend of Beck et al. (2018)	code (Csb) + zone 1–30
Holdridge life zones	Holdridge (1967)	life-zone name + belt/province
Thornthwaite	Thornthwaite (1948)	moisture + thermal province

It grew out of the Climate_Classifications Earth-Engine notebooks, but reimplements the algorithms as dependency-free Python so they run anywhere — a laptop, a CI job, or inside a hydrological model pipeline — without a Google Earth Engine account.

Install

pip install climaclass                 # core: zero dependencies
pip install "climaclass[symfluence]"   # + SYMFLUENCE attribute-processor plugin

Use

from climaclass import MonthlyClimate, classify

reykjavik = MonthlyClimate(
    temp=[0.1, 0.4, 0.9, 3.3, 6.8, 9.4, 10.9, 10.5, 7.7, 4.5, 1.7, 0.4],   # °C, Jan..Dec
    precip=[76, 72, 82, 58, 44, 50, 52, 62, 67, 86, 73, 79],               # mm,  Jan..Dec
    latitude=64.1,
)

results = classify(reykjavik)
print(results["koppen"].code)        # 'Cfc'  (subpolar oceanic)
print(results["holdridge"].name)     # e.g. 'Boreal moist forest'
print(results["thornthwaite"].code)  # moisture/thermal province code
print(results["koppen"].details)     # MAT, MAP, Pthreshold, ... for QA

Run a single scheme directly:

from climaclass import koppen
koppen.classify(reykjavik).zone      # 16  (Beck et al. legend)

Input

Everything keys off one small record, MonthlyClimate:

• temp — 12 monthly mean temperatures (°C), January → December (required)
• precip — 12 monthly total precipitation (mm), January → December (required)
• latitude — optional; refines Thornthwaite PET day-length and fixes hemisphere
• tmin / tmax — optional, reserved for future scheme variants

SYMFLUENCE plugin

The optional symfluence extra ships an attribute processor that emits climate classes as catchment attributes (climate.koppen_code, climate.holdridge_zone, climate.thornthwaite_code, …), computed from the WorldClim monthly rasters SYMFLUENCE already acquires — so there is no new data dependency and no Earth Engine in the loop. It is registered via the symfluence.attribute_processors entry point and can be used as a regionalization / PUB grouping variable.

The integration is fully decoupled: importing climaclass never imports SYMFLUENCE, and the pure mapping helper record_to_attributes(temp, precip) is testable on its own.

Develop

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest -q
ruff check src/

License

Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE and NOTICE. The classification algorithms were prototyped in the author's Climate_Classifications Earth-Engine notebooks and relicensed by the copyright holder.