Skip to content

Commit

Permalink
add multidimensional spatial means tutorial (#860)
Browse files Browse the repository at this point in the history
* add multidimensional spatial means tutorial

* a couple of text changes

* text changes in first half
  • Loading branch information
tiemvanderdeure authored Jan 20, 2025
1 parent f867e06 commit 916f908
Showing 1 changed file with 54 additions and 3 deletions.
57 changes: 54 additions & 3 deletions docs/src/tutorials/spatial_mean.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -88,13 +88,13 @@ You can see here that cells are largest towards the equator, and smallest away f

## Computing the spatial mean

Now we can compute the average precipitation per square meter. First, we compute total precipitation per grid cell:
Now we can compute the average precipitation per square meter. First, we compute total precipitation over each grid cell. (The units of this Raster will be m^2 * mm, which happens to be equal to liter.)

````@example cellarea
precip_per_area = masked_precip .* masked_areas
````

We can sum this to get the total precipitation per square meter across Chile:
We can sum this to get the total precipitation across Chile:

````@example cellarea
total_precip = sum(skipmissing(precip_per_area))
Expand All @@ -106,7 +106,7 @@ We can also sum the areas to get the total area of Chile (in this raster, at lea
total_area = sum(skipmissing(masked_areas))
````

And we can convert that to an average by dividing by the total area:
And we can convert that to an average (in mm) by dividing by the total area:

````@example cellarea
avg_precip = total_precip / total_area
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -141,3 +141,54 @@ We've also seen how to use the `cellarea` function to compute the area of each c

We've seen that the spatial mean is not the same as the arithmetic mean, and that we need to account for the area of each cell when computing the average.

## Bonus: Computing spatial means across dimensions

As a next step, we would like to know how precipitation will change in Chile until the end of the 21st century. To do this, we can use climate model outputs. This is a bit more complicated than calculating historical precipitation, because the forecast data can come from multiple climate models (GCMs), which each can be run under different socio-economic scenarios (SSPs). Here, we'll show how to use additional dimensions to keep track of this type of data.

To start, we define a simple function that takes an SSP (socioeconomic scenario) and a GCM (climate model) as input, and return the appropriate climate data.

````@example zonal
using Dates
getfutureprec(ssp, gcm) = Raster(WorldClim{Future{Climate, CMIP6, gcm, ssp}}, :prec, date = Date(2090))
````

Rather than having a seperate Raster object for each combination of GCM and SSP, we will do our analysis on a single Raster, which will have `gcm` and `ssp` as additional dimensions. In total, our Raster will have four dimensions: X, Y, gcm, and ssp.

To accomplish this, we will leverage some tools from [DimensionalData](https://github.com/rafaqz/DimensionalData.jl), which is the package that underlies Rasters.jl. We start by defining two dimensions that correspond to the SSPs and GCMs we are interested in, then use the `@d` macro from [DimensionalData](https://github.com/rafaqz/DimensionalData.jl) to preserve these dimensions as we get the data, and then combine all Rasters into a single object using `Rasters.combine`.

````@example cellarea
SSPs = Dim{:ssp}([SSP126, SSP370]) # SSP126 is a low-emission scenario, SSP370 is a high-emission scenario
GCMs = Dim{:gcm}([GFDL_ESM4, IPSL_CM6A_LR]) # These are different general circulation (climate) models
precip_future = (@d getfutureprec.(SSPs, GCMs)) |> RasterSeries |> Rasters.combine
````

Since the format of WorldClim's datasets for future climate is slightly different from the dataset for the historical period, this actually returned a 5-dimensional raster, with a `Band` dimension that represents months. Here we'll just select the 6th month, matching the selection above (but note that the analysis would also work for all Bands simultaneously). We will also replace the `NaN` missing value by the more standard `missing` using [`replace_missing`](@ref).

````@example cellarea
precip_future = precip_future[Band = 6]
precip_future = replace_missing(precip_future)
````

On our 4-dimensional raster, functions like `crop` and `mask`, as well as broadcasting, will still work.

Here we repeat the procedure from above to mask out areas so we only have data for Chile, and then multiply by the cell area.

````@example cellarea
masked_precip_future = mask(crop(precip_future; to = chile); with = chile)
precip_litres_future = masked_precip_future .* areas
````

Now we calculate the average precipitation for each SSP and each GCM. Annoyingly, the future WorldClim doesn't have data for all land pixels, so we have to re-calculate the total area.

````@example cellarea
masked_areas_future = mask(areas, with = masked_precip_future[ssp = 1, gcm = 1])
total_area_f = sum(skipmissing(masked_areas_future))
avg_prec_future = map(eachslice(precip_litres_future; dims = (:ssp, :gcm))) do slice
sum(skipmissing(slice)) / total_area_f
end
````

Which shows us that June rainfall in Chile will be slightly lower in the future, especially under the high-emission SSP370 scenario.

0 comments on commit 916f908

Please sign in to comment.