tobac v1.5.4 released

[swf...@uah.edu]

Dear tobac users,

We are pleased to announce the release of tobac v1.5.4, which is now available on conda-forge. 

This is a minor release focusing on enhancing existing functions, bug fixes, and updates to the documentation. As part of this update, we have enhanced the merge/split functionalities to work with periodic boundaries and allow for online calculation of bulk statistics with the raw input data during feature detection. The full changelog is below.

Some of these updates are made in preparation for the v1.6 update, which will focus on a full switch to using xarray with tobac, making development and use much easier. This update will be non-breaking, meaning you can continue to use your existing iris-based code. We expect this update sometime early next year. 

Changelog

Enhancements for Users

• Added the ability to use the Minimum Euclidean Spanning Tree merge/split method on data with periodic boundaries #372
• Added the ability to calculate online bulk statistics during feature detection on the raw (i.e., unsmoothed) data #449

Bug fixes

• Fixes to calculations of bulk statistics #437
• Fixes to handling of PBC feature points on the PBC wraparound border #434
• Fixed an error that allows non-matching features to be used in the offline bulk statistics calculation #448
• Fixed a bug that prevented using minimum distance filtering with varying vertical coordinates #452

Documentation

• Add thumbnails to the new example gallery #428
• Added documentation for developers #281
• Updated documentation for the n_min_threshold function in feature detection #432
• Added documentation for dealing with big datasets #408
• Updated documentation to note that the tobac v1.5.0 paper in GMD is in its final form #450

Internal Enhancements

• PBC Distance Function handling improved for tracking and other portions of the library that uses it #386
• Added tests to tobac.utils.get_spacings #429
• Added matrix testing for Python 3.12 #451
• Resolved issues around updating dependencies in black formatting checks and Zenodo JSON checks #457

All changes: v1.5.3...v1.5.4
Full Changelog: https://github.com/tobac-project/tobac/blob/343243f8d13e62569c0ca201df21b9bb370dcc3d/CHANGELOG.md

Thanks,
The tobac dev team