DAWG Update: May 2024 (SuperDARN Workshop 2024)
Items for the PIs
We need more active members in this Working Group in order to make it successful. Current members are stretched thin and not always able to give the attention necessary to make this working group successful. We ask the PIs to help us with increasing our membership or provide any feedback on how our working group can function better. Another option we may adopt is to loosen our testing, verification, and approval requirements. While this would allow developments to be added in a timely manner, we would introduce the risk that updates may crash the software or give unexpected results for some users.
Activities Since 2023 SD Workshop
The Data Analysis Working Group held a meeting on July 6, 2023 in place of a working group meeting at the 2023 Workshop to discuss topics related RST and data analysis policies.
We discussed the updated policy on embargo’ed data that the PIs agreed to during the 2023 SuperDARN Workshop. There were a lot of questions on how this policy would apply and be implemented, but our working group had some initial ideas to get started on. We decided to start with the line-of-sight radar data. Future discussions would cover how embargo’ed data would apply to combined data-types such as grid and map files.
RST
The group is looking to release version 5.1 with a number of updates. Some progress has been made on merging these updates in, but many have stalled. In that time, there have been other developments that need to be added in. We are exploring options on how to speed up developments as noted in the “Items for PIs” section. Otherwise, a few notes about RST development:
- A fix has been applied to fit_speck_removal as it was setting the quality flag to zero but not removing the “specks” themselves.
- Updated the radar geographic latitude and longitude locations in the hardware files based on commercial-grade satellite imagery from the Polar Geospatial Center, all of which have received PI approval (see SuperDARN/hdw#7). Information is also included for the 6 new mid-latitude radars constructed by NSSC: LJE, LJW, SZE, SZW, HJE, HJW
- Note the SYE and SYS locations have not been modified because PI approval for those radars is still pending. Also note the precision of a subset of radars has been kept to the original 2 or 3 decimal places at that PI’s request.
- Finally, a fix is included for the WAL radar which was operating with only 16 beams (centered about boresight) for a ~20 month interval from 2022-2023. This means that any previously geolocated data from the WAL radar for this period will be incorrect.
Higher-level Issues/Topics
- This working group hasn’t made much progress on items since summer 2023 including updates for RST. This slow down seems to be from current members not being able to devote as much time to this Working Group. We are in a great need of new students and software developers to help out with testing.
- During our July 2023 meeting, it was noted the new Mac/Apple OS (Silicon) has a problem running IDL. There is a little bit of IDL in RST, so it may be helpful to maintain copies of RST with precompiled binaries. Since that meeting it’s been found that there are other critical parts on RST that are having trouble compiling on Mac OS as well: https://github.com/SuperDARN/rst/issues/609 . Resolving this issue may be complex as not many of our developers use Mac OS.