raven-hydro 0.3.1

Raven-hydro is a Python-based installer for the hydrologic modelling framework Raven.

• Free software: Apache Software License v2.0

About

Raven is a hydrological modeling framework that lets hydrologists build hydrological models by combining different hydrological processes together. It can also be used to emulate a variety of existing lumped and distributed models. Model structure, parameters, initial conditions and forcing files are configured in text files, which Raven parses to build and run hydrological simulations. A detailed description about modeling capability of Raven can be found in the docs.

Purpose

The goal of this project is to provide a Python-based multiplatform installer for the Raven hydrological model using scikit-build-core and pybind11. The compiled binary is built with support for NetCDF4, and uses a custom CMakeLists.txt, rather than the one provided with the Raven source code, in order to leverage pip for handling the installation and management of binaries and libraries.

This project supports RavenPy by providing a dedicated library for downloading, compiling, and installing the Raven binary (with NetCDF4 support by default) on multiple platforms, as well as providing version control and updates via pip/PyPI.

The source code for Raven is not included in this repository, but is fetched from the releases of RavenHydroFramework GitHub repository and compiled during the installation process.

Features

• Download, compile, version control, and package updating of the Raven Hydrologic model via pip/PyPI
• Preserve copyright notices and licensing information
• Multiplatform support (macOS, Linux, Windows, BSD, etc.)

Installation

Warning By default, this build of Raven requires that NetCDF4 libraries are installed on the system, exposed on the $PATH, and discoverable using the FindNetCDF.cmake helper script.

On Linux, this can be provided by the libnetcdf-dev system library; On macOS by the netcdf homebrew package; And on Windows by using UNIDATA's pre-built binaries.

This can also be provided by the libnetcdf package available at conda-forge, though this is not guaranteed to work on macOS at time of writing (further research required).

raven-hydro can be installed from PyPI using the following command:

$ pip install raven-hydro

To install raven-hydro from PyPI without NetCDF support:

$ pip install raven-hydro -Ccmake.define.USE_NETCDF=false

For development purposes, we recommend cloning the repository and performing an --editable installation:

$ git clone git@github.com:Ouranosinc/raven-hydro
$ cd raven-hydro
$ pip install --editable .