ROMS-Tools: Reproducible Preprocessing and Analysis for Regional Ocean Modeling with ROMS

The ocean regulates Earth's climate and sustains marine ecosystems by circulating and storing heat, carbon, oxygen, and nutrients, while exchanging heat and gases with the atmosphere. Scientists study these processes using ocean models, which simulate the ocean on a grid. Regional ocean models focus computational resources on a limited geographical area with fine grid spacing, and can resolve fine-scale phenomena such as mesoscale and submesoscale features, tidal dynamics, coastal currents, upwelling, and detailed biogeochemical (BGC) processes. A widely used regional ocean model is ROMS (Regional Ocean Modeling System). ROMS has been coupled to the Marine Biogeochemistry Library (MARBL) to link physical and BGC processes. ROMS-MARBL supports research on environmental management, fisheries, regional climate impacts, and ocean-based carbon dioxide removal (CDR) strategies. ROMS-Tools is a Python package that streamlines the preparation and analysis of ROMS-MARBL simulations by enabling users to generate regional grids, prepare model inputs efficiently, and analyze model outputs. By providing a modern, user-friendly interface, ROMS-Tools lowers technical barriers, improves reproducibility, and allows scientists to focus on research rather than data preparation. The package is installable via Conda or PyPI and can be run interactively in Jupyter notebooks.

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Loose, N., Nicholas, T., Maticka, S., Eilerman, S., McBride, C., Stephenson, D., Heede, U., Saenz, B., Thyng, K. M., Bachman, S., Damien, P., Karspeck, A., Long, M. C., Molemaker, M. J., and Wyatt, A. (2026). ROMS-Tools: Reproducible preprocessing and analysis for regional ocean modeling with ROMS, Journal of Open Source Software, 11, 10234, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.10234.