Computational oceanography is the study of ocean phenomena by numerical simulation, especially dynamical and physical phenomena. Progress in information technology has driven exponential growth in the number of global ocean observations and the fidelity of numerical simulations of the ocean in the past few decades. The growth has been exponentially faster for ocean simulations, however. We argue that this faster growth is shifting the importance of field measurements and numerical simulations for oceanographic research. It is leading to the maturation of computational oceanography as a branch of marine science on par with observational oceanography. One implication is that ultraresolved ocean simulations are only loosely constrained by observations. Another implication is that barriers to analyzing the output of such simulations should be removed. Although some specific limits and challenges exist, many opportunities are identified for the future of computational oceanography. Most important is the prospect of hybrid computational and observational approaches to advance understanding of the ocean.

OceanSpy is an open-source and user-friendly Python package that enables scientists and inter- ested amateurs to analyze and visualize oceanographic data sets. OceanSpy builds on software packages developed by the Pangeo community, in particular Xarray (Hoyer & Hamman, 2017), Dask (Dask Development Team, 2016), and Xgcm (“Xgcm,” n.d.). The integration of Dask facilitates scalability, which is important for the petabyte-scale simulations that are becoming available. OceanSpy can be used as a standalone package for analysis of local circulation model output, or it can be run on a remote data-analysis cluster, such as the Johns Hopkins University SciServer system (Medvedev, Lemson, & Rippin, 2016), which hosts several sim- ulations and is publicly available. OceanSpy enables extraction, processing, and visualization of model data to (i) compare with oceanographic observations, and (ii) portray the kinematic and dynamic space-time properties of the circulation.