Skip to article frontmatterSkip to article content

Hi, I’m Tom Nicholas πŸ‘‹

Profile picture of Dr Tom Nicholas
A bit about me...
πŸ’Ό Engineer @ Earthmover
🌎 Active member of the Pangeo Community
πŸŒ• Core developer of Xarray
πŸ§ͺ PhD in fusion plasma physics from Uni. York & CCFE

I also work on several other open-source projects for science.

Recent blog postsΒΆ

Fundamentals: What is Cloud-Optimized Scientific Data?

The article I wish I could have read back when I first heard of Zarr in 2018. Explains how object storage and conventional filesystems are different, and the key properties that make Zarr work so well in cloud object storage.

Date: April 17, 2025 | Author: Tom Nicholas | Tags: cloud, zarr, netcdf, earthmover, open-science
Science needs a social network for sharing big data

Imagine being able to visit one website, search for any scientific dataset from any institution in the world, preview it, then stream the data out at high speed, in the format you prefer. We have the technology - here's what we should build.

Date: January 18, 2025 | Author: Tom Nicholas | Tags: open-science, frost
Xarray x NASA: xarray.DataTree for hierarchical data structures

How xarray's new DataTree feature came about, and thoughts on how public agencies can support the open-source scientific software that they depend on.

Date: December 19, 2024 | Author: Tom Nicholas | Tags: code, python, xarray, open-science
Cubed: Bounded-memory serverless array processing in xarray

Cubed was designed to address the main problems with Dask, so I integrated it with Xarray.

Date: June 01, 2023 | Author: Tom Nicholas | Tags: code, python, xarray, dask, cubed, open-science
Dask.distributed and Pangeo: Better performance for everyone thanks to science / software collaboration

Dask's distributed scheduler algorithm got a major fix after we tested its' limits on a huge oceanography analysis problem.

Date: January 04, 2023 | Author: Tom Nicholas | Tags: code, python, dask, open-science