# A presentation on pyDeltaRCM and DeltaMetrics for the UTIG Discussion Hour

As part of my Postdoc research, I have been leading the development of two programming projects. Both of these projects have found a home (for now at least) under the DeltaRCM umbrella, which lives at deltarcm.org. Myself and co-authors recently presented on some of this effort to a discussion group at UTIG, and the talk was recorded. You can check it out here.

The first project, pyDeltaRCM, is a flexible and extensible implementation of the DeltaRCM numerical delta model model (Liang et al., 2015a). In this implementation, we have taken special care to create a product that can be adapted for many different kinds of numerical delta experiments, without needing to reproduce core model code. This is a strategy we have adopted to try and eliminate diverging codebases among researchers working with the same model (i.e,. DeltaRCM). On top of that, we have implemented a number of tools to make experimenting easy, ensure reproducible results, and accelerate computation. The project’s codebase is on GitHub and the documentation is hosted at the project url.

The second project, DeltaMetrics, is a flexible and extensible set of objects, routines, and visualizations to help analyze depositional-system spatiotemporal data. The Python library takes an object-oriented approach that will be familiar to Python users, and implements sedimentology-specific objects. In one sentence, DeltaMetrics establishes a t-x-y Cube of data, and then allows users to make cross sections, compute stratigraphy, analyze planform geometry, and more, with just a few simple lines of code. Our development so far has focused on working with the output data from the pyDeltaRCM model, but exert an effort to keep thing generalized, so that other data sources, e.g., physical laboratory experiments and satellite observations, also work with DeltaMetrics. The project’s codebase is on GitHub and the documentation is hosted at the project url.

1. Liang, M., Voller, V. R., & Paola, C. (2015a). A reduced-complexity model for river delta formation – Part 1: Modeling deltas with channel dynamics. Earth Surface Dynamics, 3(1), 67–86. doi: 10.5194/esurf-3-67-2015

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