Current limitations

Irregular meshes

ESMPy is actually able to deal with general irregular meshes (example), but designing an elegant front-end for that is very challenging. Plain 2D arrays cannot describe irregular meshes. There needs to be additional information for connectivity, as suggested by UGRID Conventions.

xESMF supports quadrilateral grids and has limited support of triangular or hexagonal meshes. xESMF also supports complex polygonal meshes, but only in the context of regional averaging.

xarray’s data model, although powerful, can only describe quadrilateral grids (including multi-tile quadrilateral grids like the cubed-sphere). If there is an elegant data model in Python for irregular meshes, interfacing with ESMPy should not be very difficult. Pull requests along these lines are welcome.

Vector regridding

Like almost all regridding packages, xESMF assumes scalar fields. The most common way to remap winds is to rotate/re-decompose the wind components (U and V) to the new direction, and then regrid each component individually using a scalar regridding function.

Exact conservation of vector properities (like divergence and vorticity) is beyond the scope of almost all regridding packages. Using bilinear algorithm on each component should lead to OK results in most cases.