DAWG Update: May 2025 (SuperDARN Workshop 2025)
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.
No comment needed, but to inform the PIs, we will be looking at adjusting our authorship guidelines which will likely include more authors. This comes from the feedback received after making the RST 5.1 release as well as during the release process from in our own working group. Any examples of large collaborative projects with many authors and how they handle authorship would be appreciated.
Activities Since 2024 SD Workshop
After the “during the Workshop” working group meting on May 28, 2024, the working group testing and review slowed over the summer of 2024 and into the rest of the year. Leading up to the Annual AGU meeting in December 2024, there were e-mail requests on the need for RST 5.1 to be released. This review effort stalled until the new year. Starting at the end of Feb. 2025, the working group has started to hold monthly meetings to work through discussion items and to work on coordinating software testing and approval. This monthly pace seems to be effective for the working group for now and will continue through the next year.
RST 5.1
After much discussion and lengthy review, the working group was able to complete the RST 5.1 release on 1 May 2025. The release notes of what’s included in this release can be found on the github site as well as Zenodo. Please download this version from Zenodo and cite the new release!
To highlight changes for the PIs:
- New AACGM_v2 coefficients with solutions from 2025 to 2030. Not possible to obtain coordinates for 2025 without this latest version.
- Addition of Iceland East (ice), West (icw); Longjing East (lje), West (ljw); Siziwanqi East (sze), West (szw); Hejing East (hje), West (hjw) radar information
- Updated hdw.dat files for Blackstone (bks), Kodiak (kod), King Salmon (ksr). These were included in the hdw repo a while ago, but just now propagating to the RST repo. Our Working Group uses the hdw repo as the definitive source for hdw files.
- Addition of tdiff.dat files for several radars. These are optionally used at this point.
Higher-level Issues/Topics
- In the final stages of the RST 5.1 release, it became apparent that the Working Group needs to revisit the authorship guidelines that were last updated in 2021. One of the initial ideas is to do away with the idea that people are ever taken off of the authorship list. With this idea, the next release would feature many more authors that are currently acknowledged in our AUTHORS.md file. Another item to review during this discussion is how individual authors are ordered in the list of authors.
- There was a long time between the RST 5.0 (Dec. 2022) and RST 5.1 (May 2025) release. We may want to explore better mechanisms or checks for being able to make a release in a timely manner. We’ve relaxed some of our testing and pull request requirements, but will need some better attention going forward. It is hoped that the monthly meetings can help keep these kinds of tasks moving along and prevent things from stalling out.
- Our working group could use new members and from a variety of institutions to help alleviate the load and effort to keep progress with testing and merge approvals moving along. As well, there is a risk of the low amount of effort being unable to quickly overcome large changes such as depenedency issues with new linux and Macintosh OS updates/versions. We are in a great need of new students, software developers, or researchers interested in software development to help out with testing.