Quarterly Update: November 2020

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Items for PI review

1. Charter update: See September 2020 report
Status: Awaiting PI approval

2. Software authorship guidelines: See September 2020 report
Status: Still under discussion in DAWG, but any feedback is welcome

Software releases

RST

We are working on a new minor release of the RST (v4.5), which should be available by the end of November. Key features will include:

• New library for processing and plotting sounding mode data (snd) from interleavesound, by Evan Thomas
• Updated documentation on SuperDARN file formats, and installation of the NASA CDF library (RST dependency)
• Bug fixes to plotting libraries and make_fit -old
• Upgraded compiler to C99 and removed numerous compilation warnings

pyDARN

pyDARN is in the process of a new minor release focusing on Fan plots. Currently what is also included is:

• ACF plotting
• pwr0 statistical plotting
• option to plot in slant ranges
• using pyDARNio for reading in files

FITACF 3.0

Marina Schmidt is making good progress with restructuring the FITACF 3.0 source code. She has recently added the Shepherd (2017) elevation angle calculation to FITACF 3.0 (currently only available in FITACF 2.5). This update will not be included in RST4.5 as it requires further development and testing, but we expect that it will be ready for the release after that.

DAWG-related links on institution websites

Please check the following information on your institution websites:

1. The official release location of the RST is Zenodo. This link will always resolve to the latest version: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.801458
   Please remove any links directing users to Github or the Virginia Tech website to download the software

2. The DAWG website is https://superdarn.github.io/dawg
   The previous website hosted by Pasha/Usask is no longer maintained by DAWG

Processing ‘dat’ files in RST

When running make_fit on old-format dat files, the DAWG recommends the following workflow:

dattorawacf [file].dat > [file].rawacf   #convert dat format to rawacf format
make_fit [file].rawacf > [file].fitacf   #run make_fit on the rawacf file

This is preferable to using make_fit -old [file].dat [file].fit, since it avoids lossy compression associated with the old-format files. More information is available in the RST documentation.