Driver cleanup and other design ideas

[blychs]

Hi all.
I have been thinking of a few ideas for cleaning up the driver:
a) I think that the obs, model and pair class should be defined outside the driver. Having the analysis class in there is enough, the other classes would be separate files. This would make them easier to read.
b) The plotting method of the analysis class should only contain the iterations, region selection and general definitions. Everything else can be directly managed by the plotting tool, which should be the one deciding which plotting function to call.
c) I've been really thinking about the way that we define model and obs. To me, the way we are doing it made sense when MM was designed, with only model-to-obs comparisons in mind. However, conceptually, all of those are just datsets, of basically four types:

• gridded (L3 data, model data) -structured or unstructured,
• spatial swath data (L2 satellite, which we treat very differently from gridded),
• point data, remote or surface,
• "track" data, either mobile or aircraft.

This means that if we can develop a method to pair those types of data with each other, we would have a totally general tool, that could basically be used for everything.

I think that a) is immediately actionable. b) would take a bit more effort, but seems doable. c), however, is a major overhaul, which is more an expression of desire on my part that something that I think we could do in the near future.
Cheers
Pablo