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ClimXtract: A Python Toolkit for Standardizing High-Resolution Climate Datasets for Regional Domains Cover

ClimXtract: A Python Toolkit for Standardizing High-Resolution Climate Datasets for Regional Domains

Open Access
|Feb 2026

Abstract

High-resolution climate data is crucial for studying regional climate impacts and extremes, especially in topographically complex regions [1]. However, users often face barriers when trying to access and process datasets from multiple sources due to differences in data structure, resolution, grid structure, and naming conventions. ClimXtract is a modular Python toolkit developed to address this challenge. It provides standardized functions for downloading, regridding, and spatially masking multiple climate datasets into a common format compatible with any high-resolution climate dataset for a given regional domain. ClimXtract includes support for variable harmonization (e.g., for temperature and precipitation), interpolation for different grid types, and optional masking to a target domain. It builds upon the libraries xarray [2] and CDO [3], which are widely used in the climate data community, and is designed for domain scientists and non-specialists alike. Together with processed example datasets and Jupyter notebooks, ClimXtract provides the climate community with a reproducible workflow for preparing data for research and downstream applications. While here presented using the ÖKS15 dataset for Austria [4] as an example, ClimXtract can equally be applied to other regions of interest and target formats more generally.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/jors.627 | Journal eISSN: 2049-9647
Language: English
Submitted on: Sep 18, 2025
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Accepted on: Feb 11, 2026
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Published on: Feb 25, 2026
Published by: Ubiquity Press
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 1 issue per year

© 2026 Maximilian Meindl, Luiza Sabchuk, Aiko Voigt, published by Ubiquity Press
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.