xwmb: xarray-enabled Water Mass transformation Budgets (WMB) using structured ocean model output

xWMB is a Python package that provides a efficient and lazy computation of Water Mass Budgets in arbitrary sub-domains of C-grid ocean models. Most of the heavy lifting is done by dependency packages by the same team of developers:

• sectionate: for computing transports normal to a section (open or closed)
• regionate: for converting between gridded masks and the closed sections that bound them
• xbudget: for model-agnostic wrangling of multi-level tracer budgets
• xwmt: for computing bulk water mass transformations from these budgets

Documentation is not yet available, but the core API is illustrated in the example notebooks here and in each of the dependency packages.

If you use xwmb, please cite the companion manuscript: Henri F. Drake, Shanice Bailey, Raphael Dussin, Stephen M. Griffies, John Krasting, Graeme MacGilchrist, Geoffrey Stanley, Jan-Erik Tesdal, Jan D. Zika. Water Mass Transformation Budgets in Finite-Volume Generalized Vertical Coordinate Ocean Models. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems. 08 March 2025. DOI: doi.org/10.1029/2024MS004383

Quick Start Guide

Minimal installation within an existing environment

conda install -c conda-forge xwmb

Installing from scratch using conda

This is the recommended mode of installation for developers.

git clone git@github.com:hdrake/xwmb.git
cd xwmb
conda env create -f docs/environment.yml
conda activate docs_env_xwmb
pip install -e .

You can verify that the package was properly installed by confirming it passes all of the tests with:

pytest -v

You can launch a Jupyterlab instance using this environment with:

python -m ipykernel install --user --name docs_env_xwmb --display-name "docs_env_xwmb"
jupyter-lab

Releasing

The git tag is the version. xwmb has no version string checked into the source tree: hatch-vcs derives it from the tag at build time and writes xwmb/_version.py (gitignored, but shipped inside the sdist and wheel). To cut a release you tag; there is no file to bump and nothing to keep in sync.

1. Make sure main is green and has everything you want in the release.
2. Publish a GitHub Release whose tag is vX.Y.Z, targeting the commit you want to ship:

   gh release create vX.Y.Z --target "$(git rev-parse origin/main)" \
     --title vX.Y.Z --generate-notes
   

   Publishing it (not merely pushing a tag) is what fires the workflow. Target the commit you actually want: a tag placed before the commit you meant to release builds the previous version, and PyPI rejects it as a duplicate.
3. The Publish to PyPI workflow builds from that tag and uploads. It checks out with fetch-depth: 0 so the tag is visible to hatch-vcs, and asserts that the built version matches the tag before publishing.
4. Verify: https://pypi.org/project/xwmb/.
5. conda-forge builds from the PyPI sdist and lags by design; the autotick bot opens the version-bump PR. The feedstock recipe must list hatch-vcs alongside hatchling in its host requirements, since it builds with --no-build-isolation.

Two things follow from the tag being the version. Never add a version literal back to the tree — xwmb/version.py is a shim over the generated file, and a 0.0.0+unknown from it means the package was imported without being built or installed, not that a number is missing. And any checkout that installs the package needs its tags: a shallow clone, or a fork that never fetched them, resolves a .devN version instead of the release line. That is why CI checks out with fetch-depth: 0 and Read the Docs unshallows in post_checkout.