Using LiPD files

Note: This page is a work in progress (moreso than most wiki pages).

After downloading a LiPD file, there are a number of ways to use it. The recommended ways are to use the LiPD utilities or pyleoclim.

LiPD Utilities

The LiPD Utilities are a primary way to interact with LiPD files. The utilities are available on GitHub in Matlab, R, and Python language. All three languages support reading and writing a LiPD file, extracting and collapsing time series, and filtering time series.

LiPD Utilities in Python 3

A note for Windows users: While programs like Python exist for Windows, you'll have more flexibility if you work in a Linux environment. To start working with Linux, you could ask your university for an account on their Linux machine, then use a program like ssh to connect. Alternately, you could install a Linux virtual machine (e.g. VirtualBox) on your PC.

To use LiPD Utilies in Python, first make sure you have Python 3 installed. If you don't, one option is Anaconda.

Next install LiPD Utilities:

pip install 

Start python:

python

import lipd

CSV files

If you’re in a jam and need a plaintext version of the data, all LiPD files contain .csv files of the raw data. Simply unzip your LiPD file to find a .csv file. However, a central goal of LiPD is to put paleoclimate data into a standardized format which common analysis scripts can be built for, so using .csv files more than necessary is not recommended.