Package Phrasebook#

There are a number of similar packages to Iris, and a lot of these have their own terminology for similar things. Whether you’re coming or going, we hope this might be a helpful guide to these differences! Definitions for each can be found in Glossary. See also Xarray terminology.

Table 10 Phrasebook#
Iris	Xarray	Example	Notes
Non-Lazy	Eager		Used to relate to functions, rather than the data.
Cube	DataArray
CubeList	Dataset		Though similar, a CubeList is a simpler object, and is not a perfect comparison to a Dataset
Merge/ Concatenate	Concatenate	Xarray concatenate	Xarray’s concatenate has the capability to largely do what both Iris merge and Iris concatenate do. However, this is not a perfect comparison, please see the link for more information.
	Merge	Xarray merge	Xarray’s Merge function doesn’t map neatly map to any Iris feature. Please see the link for more information.
Scalar Coordinate			Iris makes a distinction between scalar coordinates and non-scalar coordinates, whereas xarray documentation makes a distinction between scalar and non-scalar data. It is possible to make coordinates with scalar data in both Iris and xarray but only Iris will label such coordinates.
AuxCoord	Non-Dimensional Coordinate		Coordinates in Iris and xarray are categorised using different rules, and so are not a one-to-one match.
DimCoord	Dimension Coordinate		Coordinates in Iris and xarray are categorised using different rules, and so are not a one-to-one match.

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