Rasters.jl defines common types and methods for reading, writing and manipulating rasterized spatial data.
These currently include raster arrays like GeoTIFF and NetCDF, R grd files, multi-layered stacks, and multi-file series of arrays and stacks.
On Julia 1.9 we can put additional packages in extensions, so the code only loads when
you load a specific package. Rasters.jl was always intended to work like this,
and its finally possible. This reduced package using
time from many seconds to well under a second.
But, it means you have to manually load packages you need for each backend or additional functionality.
For example, to use the GDAL backend, and download files, you now need to do:
using Rasters, ArchGDAL, RasterDataSources
where previously it was just using Rasters
.
Sources and packages needed:
:gdal
:using ArchGDAL
:netcdf
:using NCDatasets
:grd
: built-in.:smap
:using HDF5
:grib
:using GRIBDatasets
.
Other functionality in extensions:
- Raster data downloads, like
Worldclim{Climate}
:using RasterDataSources
- Makie plots:
using Makie
- Coordinate transformations for gdal rasters:
using CoordinateTransformations
Install the package by typing:
]
add Rasters
using Rasters
Using Rasters
to read GeoTiff or NetCDF files will output something similar to the
following toy examples. This is possible because Rasters.jl extends
DimensionalData.jl so that
spatial data can be indexed using named dimensions like X
, Y
and Ti
(time)
and e.g. spatial coordinates.
using Rasters, Dates
lon, lat = X(25:1:30), Y(25:1:30)
ti = Ti(DateTime(2001):Month(1):DateTime(2002))
ras = Raster(rand(lon, lat, ti)) # this generates random numbers with the dimensions given
6×6×13 Raster{Float64,3} with dimensions:
X Sampled{Int64} 25:1:30 ForwardOrdered Regular Points,
Y Sampled{Int64} 25:1:30 ForwardOrdered Regular Points,
Ti Sampled{DateTime} DateTime("2001-01-01T00:00:00"):Month(1):DateTime("2002-01-01T00:00:00") ForwardOrdered Regular Points
extent: Extent(X = (25, 30), Y = (25, 30), Ti = (DateTime("2001-01-01T00:00:00"), DateTime("2002-01-01T00:00:00")))
missingval: missing
values: [:, :, 1]
25 26 27 28 29 30
25 0.9063 0.427328 0.0320967 0.297023 0.0571002 0.891377
26 0.443494 0.867547 0.350546 0.150155 0.24565 0.711039
27 0.745673 0.0991336 0.930332 0.893537 0.805931 0.360583
28 0.512083 0.125287 0.959434 0.354868 0.337824 0.259563
29 0.253849 0.692209 0.774092 0.131798 0.823656 0.390013
30 0.334152 0.136551 0.183555 0.941133 0.450484 0.461862
[and 12 more slices...]
lon = lookup(ras, X) # if X is longitude
lat = lookup(ras, Y) # if Y is latitude
Sampled{Int64} ForwardOrdered Regular Points
wrapping: 25:1:30
Selecting a time slice by index
is done via
ras[Ti(1)]
6×6 Raster{Float64,2} with dimensions:
X Sampled{Int64} 25:1:30 ForwardOrdered Regular Points,
Y Sampled{Int64} 25:1:30 ForwardOrdered Regular Points
and reference dimensions:
Ti Sampled{DateTime} DateTime("2001-01-01T00:00:00"):Month(1):DateTime("2001-01-01T00:00:00") ForwardOrdered Regular Points
extent: Extent(X = (25, 30), Y = (25, 30))
missingval: missing
values: 25 26 27 28 29 30
25 0.9063 0.427328 0.0320967 0.297023 0.0571002 0.891377
26 0.443494 0.867547 0.350546 0.150155 0.24565 0.711039
27 0.745673 0.0991336 0.930332 0.893537 0.805931 0.360583
28 0.512083 0.125287 0.959434 0.354868 0.337824 0.259563
29 0.253849 0.692209 0.774092 0.131798 0.823656 0.390013
30 0.334152 0.136551 0.183555 0.941133 0.450484 0.461862
ras[Ti=1]
6×6 Raster{Float64,2} with dimensions:
X Sampled{Int64} 25:1:30 ForwardOrdered Regular Points,
Y Sampled{Int64} 25:1:30 ForwardOrdered Regular Points
and reference dimensions:
Ti Sampled{DateTime} DateTime("2001-01-01T00:00:00"):Month(1):DateTime("2001-01-01T00:00:00") ForwardOrdered Regular Points
extent: Extent(X = (25, 30), Y = (25, 30))
missingval: missing
values: 25 26 27 28 29 30
25 0.9063 0.427328 0.0320967 0.297023 0.0571002 0.891377
26 0.443494 0.867547 0.350546 0.150155 0.24565 0.711039
27 0.745673 0.0991336 0.930332 0.893537 0.805931 0.360583
28 0.512083 0.125287 0.959434 0.354868 0.337824 0.259563
29 0.253849 0.692209 0.774092 0.131798 0.823656 0.390013
30 0.334152 0.136551 0.183555 0.941133 0.450484 0.461862
or and interval of indices using the syntax =a:b
or (a:b)
ras[Ti(1:10)]
6×6×10 Raster{Float64,3} with dimensions:
X Sampled{Int64} 25:1:30 ForwardOrdered Regular Points,
Y Sampled{Int64} 25:1:30 ForwardOrdered Regular Points,
Ti Sampled{DateTime} DateTime("2001-01-01T00:00:00"):Month(1):DateTime("2001-10-01T00:00:00") ForwardOrdered Regular Points
extent: Extent(X = (25, 30), Y = (25, 30), Ti = (DateTime("2001-01-01T00:00:00"), DateTime("2001-10-01T00:00:00")))
missingval: missing
values: [:, :, 1]
25 26 27 28 29 30
25 0.9063 0.427328 0.0320967 0.297023 0.0571002 0.891377
26 0.443494 0.867547 0.350546 0.150155 0.24565 0.711039
27 0.745673 0.0991336 0.930332 0.893537 0.805931 0.360583
28 0.512083 0.125287 0.959434 0.354868 0.337824 0.259563
29 0.253849 0.692209 0.774092 0.131798 0.823656 0.390013
30 0.334152 0.136551 0.183555 0.941133 0.450484 0.461862
[and 9 more slices...]
ras[Ti=At(DateTime(2001))]
6×6 Raster{Float64,2} with dimensions:
X Sampled{Int64} 25:1:30 ForwardOrdered Regular Points,
Y Sampled{Int64} 25:1:30 ForwardOrdered Regular Points
and reference dimensions:
Ti Sampled{DateTime} DateTime("2001-01-01T00:00:00"):Month(1):DateTime("2001-01-01T00:00:00") ForwardOrdered Regular Points
extent: Extent(X = (25, 30), Y = (25, 30))
missingval: missing
values: 25 26 27 28 29 30
25 0.9063 0.427328 0.0320967 0.297023 0.0571002 0.891377
26 0.443494 0.867547 0.350546 0.150155 0.24565 0.711039
27 0.745673 0.0991336 0.930332 0.893537 0.805931 0.360583
28 0.512083 0.125287 0.959434 0.354868 0.337824 0.259563
29 0.253849 0.692209 0.774092 0.131798 0.823656 0.390013
30 0.334152 0.136551 0.183555 0.941133 0.450484 0.461862
More options are available, like Near
, Contains
and Where
. For more details go here.
Dimensions can also be used in most Base
and Statistics
methods like mean
and reduce
where dims
arguments are required. Much of the behaviour is
covered in the DimensionalData
docs.
See the docs for more details and examples for Rasters.jl.
Rasters provides a standardised interface that allows many source data types to be used with identical syntax.
- Scripts and packages building on Rasters.jl can treat
Raster
,RasterStack
, andRasterSeries
as black boxes.- The data could hold GeoTiff or NetCDF files,
Array
s in memory orCuArray
s on the GPU - they will all behave in the same way. RasterStack
can be backed by a Netcdf or HDF5 file, or aNamedTuple
ofRaster
holding.tif
files, or allRaster
in memory.- Users do not have to deal with the specifics of spatial file types.
- The data could hold GeoTiff or NetCDF files,
Projected
lookups with Cylindrical projections can by indexed using other Cylindrical projections by setting themappedcrs
keyword on construction. You don't need to know the underlying projection, the conversion is handled automatically. This means lat/lonEPSG(4326)
can be used seamlessly if you need that.
Raster data is complicated and there are many places for subtle or not-so-subtle bugs to creep in.
We need bug reports to reduce how often they occur over time. But also, we need issues that are easy to reproduce or it isn't practically possible to fix them.
Because there are so many raster file types and variations of them, most of the time we need the exact file that caused your problem to know how to fix it, and be sure that we have actually fixed it when we are done. So fixing a Rasters.jl bug nearly always involves downloading some file and running some code that breaks with it (if you can trigger the bug without a file, that's great! but its not always possible).
To make an issue we can fix quickly (or at all) there are three key steps:
- Include the file in an accessible place on web without authentication or any other work on our part, so we can just get it and find your bug. You can put it on a file hosting platform (e.g. google drive, drop box, whatever you use) and share the url.
- Add a minimum working example to the issue template that first downloads the file, then runs the function that triggers the bug.
- Paste the complete stack trace of the error it produces, right to the bottom, into the issue template. Then we can be sure we reproduced the same problem.
Good issues are really appreciated, but they do take just a little extra effort with Rasters.jl because of this need for files.