Topopyscale

TopoPyScale` is improving and being tested by more users. New features, improvements and bug fixes justify a new release. The whole downscaling process gain speed by spreading the load on multicores. This was tested on laptops and servers.

**WARNING**: This new release requires Python >= 3.8. Otherwise, python runs into a memory leak and crashes.

New features:
- multicore, paralleization of `topo_scale`
- tools to explore optimal number of clusters in `topo_sub`
- implementation of feature importance for clustering. New field in config file needed
- added precipitation lapse-rate option, [commit](1dfec4804560b7ae331800de17ad0afe1bf0fe5c)

Improvements:
- simplification of path management using the library pathlib
- remove all usage of `open_mfdataset()` or `to_mfdataset` that are not as efficient as expected
- simplification of `tmp` files during downscaling. 85a4149137da173b392d5ceb336f6c18e4877ed9
- added error message in case upper pressure level is not high enough

Bug fixes:
- `to_netcdf()` default case bug fixed
- plotting routines for variable mapping fixed
- fixed bug in time-batch handling of files
- bug in `fetch_WMO()` fixed

This release includes a new options in `setup.py` that the package can be installed in a single line using Pypi
bash
pip install topopyscale

- Corrected bugs associated to merge of `time_batch` branch into `main`.
- Updated and tested install

This version brings the possibility to run downscaling in batch of time. This improves the workflow when running long time series for large domain. It also includes the latest JOSS manuscript

A release with newly tested export functionalities and minor bugs correction:
- `to_crocus()` tested and updated
- `to_MuSa()` method added. Export for the Snow assimilation method [MuSa](https://github.com/ealonsogzl/MuSA)
- `to_geotop()` method added
- `to_snowpack()`method added
- New snow/rain partition method implemented followinf Jenning et al (2018). WARNIING: Not operational as is.
- functionalities to download observation data from WMO repository. File `topo_obs.py`