eurec4a-snd 0.0.29

Common EUREC4A sounding standard

eurec4a_snd

This package is ment to help in establishing a common radiosonde output format. During the EUREC4A/ATOMIC campagne many radiosondes will be launched and an unique fileformat incl. unique variables names will hopefully help there community.

Currently, this package contains a script to convert radiosonde datafile of the MW41 to netCDF files.

Simply run sounding_converter -i your_sounding.dat after the installation. During the first execution you will be asked to give meta-information which will be included in the output files.

These include e.g. contact_person and platform name which are probably helpful after the exchange of these files with other scientists.

Installation

The package can be installed with conda (https://www.anaconda.com/distribution/):

The best option is to create a new environment to not run into dependency problems with pre-installed package:

conda create --name field_campaign

Activate the new environment with

conda activate field_campaign

The actual package can than be installed with

conda install -c observingclouds eurec4a_snd

First execution

During the first execution, the meta_information.ini configuration file has to be created. The user is prompted some questions on the command line before the file will be written to the users home directory.

It is also possible to copy the config/meta_information_template.ini to ones favorite folder and change the files content accordingly. If the file in not renamed meta_information.ini and is in the home directory, the option -c has to be used during calling sounding_converter otherwise it will not recognize the configuration.

sounding_converter -i your_sounding.dat -c /your/path/to/meta_information.ini

Change meta-information

The meta-information which is used in the netCDF files and in order to create a resonable filename, can always be changed by either

• remove the file meta_information.ini in $HOME and run sounding_converter again, as if would be your first execution
• edit the file ~/meta_information.ini directly

Visualization

Panoply

The converted dat files are netCDF files which conform to the CF-Conventions as far as possible and make use of the discrete sampling geometry. The sounding data can therefore easily be drawn as trajectories without extra efforts. One example is the software Panoply

Simple Plotting

The package also includes a few plotting routines that can be called with e.g.

sounding_visualize -n converted/file/sounding.nc

SkewT Plotting

Examples on how to create a skewT diagram can be found in eurec4a_snd/examples/visualizing. Have a look at Skew-T examples

Example

Examples of the input .dat file and the converted .nc file can be found in examples/data.

Tipps and tricks

• Commands sounding_convert and sounding_visualize cannot be found! It seems something went wrong with the installation via conda. Although it is recommended to install this package via anaconda because it comes with the benefit that all dependencies should be resolved. However, you can also download this git repository and run within the eurec4a_snd folder:

  python L1_rs41.py -i your_sounding.dat
  

  or for the quicklooks

  python make_quicklooks_rs41.py -n converted/file/sounding.nc