Book Image

Applying Math with Python

By : Sam Morley
Book Image

Applying Math with Python

By: Sam Morley

Overview of this book

Python, one of the world's most popular programming languages, has a number of powerful packages to help you tackle complex mathematical problems in a simple and efficient way. These core capabilities help programmers pave the way for building exciting applications in various domains, such as machine learning and data science, using knowledge in the computational mathematics domain. The book teaches you how to solve problems faced in a wide variety of mathematical fields, including calculus, probability, statistics and data science, graph theory, optimization, and geometry. You'll start by developing core skills and learning about packages covered in Python’s scientific stack, including NumPy, SciPy, and Matplotlib. As you advance, you'll get to grips with more advanced topics of calculus, probability, and networks (graph theory). After you gain a solid understanding of these topics, you'll discover Python's applications in data science and statistics, forecasting, geometry, and optimization. The final chapters will take you through a collection of miscellaneous problems, including working with specific data formats and accelerating code. By the end of this book, you'll have an arsenal of practical coding solutions that can be used and modified to solve a wide range of practical problems in computational mathematics and data science.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Loading and storing data from NetCDF files

Many scientific applications require that we start large quantities of multi-dimensional data in a robust format. NetCDF is one example of a format used for data that's developed by the weather and climate industry. Unfortunately, the complexity of the data means that we can't simply use the utilities from the Pandas package, for example, to load this data for analysis. We need the netcdf4 package to be able to read and import the data into Python, but we also need to use xarray. Unlike the Pandas library, xarray can handle higher-dimensional data while still providing a Pandas-like interface.

In this recipe, we will learn how to load data from and store data in NetCDF files.