ascat 0.2

Readers and converters for data acquired by the ASCAT sensor on-board the MetOP satellites

Readers and converters for data acquired by the ASCAT sensor on-board the MetOP satellites. Written in Python.

Works great in combination with pytesmo.

Supported Products

This give a short overview over the supported products. Please see the documentation for detailed examples of how to work with a product.

Read ASCAT data from different sources into a common format supported by pytesmo

Time Series Products

• ASCAT SSM(Surface Soil Moisture) Time Series

  Available in netCDF format from H-SAF (H25 product)

• ASCAT SWI(Soil Water Index) Time Series

  Available in binary format from TU Wien

Image products

H-SAF provides several different image products:

• SM OBS 1 - H07 - Large scale surface soil moisture by radar scatterometer in BUFR format over Europe

• H16 - SSM ASCAT-B NRT O : Metop-B ASCAT soil moisture 12.5km sampling NRT

• H103 - SSM ASCAT-B NRT O : Metop-B ASCAT soil moisture 25km sampling NRT

• H101 - SSM ASCAT-A NRT O : Metop-A ASCAT soil moisture 12.5km sampling NRT

• H102 - SSM ASCAT-A NRT O : Metop-A ASCAT soil moisture 25km sampling NRT

• SM OBS 2 - H08 - Small scale surface soil moisture by radar scatterometer in BUFR format over Europe

• SM DAS 2 - H14 - Profile index in the roots region by scatterometer data assimilation in GRIB format, global

The products H07, H16, H101, H102, H103 come in BUFR format and can be read by the same reader. So examples for the H07 product are equally valid for the other products.

They are available after registration from the H-SAF Website

Documentation

Installation

The packages you have to install depend on the features you want to use. The H-SAF image products are disseminated in BUFR (H07, H16, H103, H101, H102, H08) or GRIB (H14) format. So to read them you will have to install the appropriate packages which will be explained shortly. Unfortunately neither BUFR nor GRIB readers work on Windows so if you need these formats then Linux or OS X are your only options.

For installation we recommend Miniconda. So please install it according to the official installation instructions. As soon as you have the conda command in your shell you can continue.

The following script will download and install all the needed packages.

conda create -q -n ascat python=2 numpy pandas netCDF4 pytest pip pyproj
source activate ascat
conda install -c cpaulik pybufr-ecmwf # for reading BUFR files
conda install -c conda-forge pygrib=2.0.1 # for reading GRIB files
pip install ascat

This script should work on Windows, Linux or OSX but on Windows you will get errors for the installation commands of pybufr-ecmwf and pygrib.

Contribute

We are happy if you want to contribute. Please raise an issue explaining what is missing or if you find a bug. We will also gladly accept pull requests against our master branch for new features or bug fixes.

Development setup

For Development we also recommend a conda environment. You can create one including test dependencies and debugger by running conda env create -f environment.yml. This will create a new ascat-dev environment which you can activate by using source activate ascat-dev.

Guidelines

If you want to contribute please follow these steps:

• Fork the ascat repository to your account

• Clone the repository, make sure you use git clone --recursive to also get the test data repository.

• make a new feature branch from the ascat master branch

• add your feature

• please include tests for your contributions in one of the test directories We use py.test so a simple function called test_my_feature is enough

• submit a pull request to our master branch

Citation

If you use the software in a publication then please cite it using the Zenodo DOI:

Note

This project has been set up using PyScaffold 2.5.6. For details and usage information on PyScaffold see http://pyscaffold.readthedocs.org/.