Atmospheric data Community Toolkit (ACT)

The Atmospheric data Community Toolkit (ACT) is an open source Python toolkit for working with atmospheric time-series datasets of varying dimensions. The toolkit has functions for every part of the scientific process; discovery, IO, quality control, corrections, retrievals, visualization, and analysis. It is a community platform for sharing code with the goal of reducing duplication of effort and better connecting the science community with programs such as the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) User Facility. Overarching development goals will be updated on a regular basis as part of the Roadmap .

Please report any issues or feature requests by sumitting an Issue. Additionally, our discussions boards are open for ideas, general discussions or questions, and show and tell!

ACT's Third Roadmap

To meet the needs of the community and stakeholders, ACT will be creating a new roadmap. This roadmap will continue a plan forward on features to improve on and to add in newer ACT versions. A part of this new roadmap is a survey from the community that will provide feedback for the developers on priorities for newer ACT versions. If time permitting, and you are a user of ACT or are considering to use ACT the survey can be found here: ACT Roadmap Survey The feedback would be much appreciated.

Important Links

• Documentation:

• Examples:

• Issue Tracker:

Citing

If you use ACT to prepare a publication, please cite the DOI listed in the badge above, which is updated with every version release to ensure that contributors get appropriate credit. DOI is provided through Zenodo.

Dependencies

• xarray
• NumPy
• SciPy
• matplotlib
• skyfield
• pandas
• dask
• Pint
• PyProj
• Six
• Requests
• MetPy
• ffspec
• lazy_loader
• cmweather

Optional Dependencies

• MPL2NC Reading binary MPL data.
• Cartopy Mapping and geoplots
• Py-ART Reading radar files, plotting and corrections
• scikit-posthocs Using interquartile range or generalized Extreme Studentized Deviate quality control tests
• icartt icartt is an ICARTT file format reader and writer for Python
• PySP2 PySP2 is a python package for reading and processing Single Particle Soot Photometer (SP2) datasets.
• MoviePy MoviePy is a python package for creating movies from images

Installation

ACT can be installed a few different ways. One way is to install using pip. When installing with pip, the ACT dependencies found in requirements.txt will also be installed. To install using pip:

pip install act-atmos

The easiest method for installing ACT is to use the conda packages from the latest release. To do this you must download and install Anaconda or Miniconda. With Anaconda or Miniconda install, it is recommended to create a new conda environment when using ACT or even other packages. To create a new environment based on the environment.yml:

conda env create -f environment.yml

Or for a basic environment and downloading optional dependencies as needed:

conda create -n act_env -c conda-forge python=3.12 act-atmos

Basic command in a terminal or command prompt to install the latest version of ACT:

conda install -c conda-forge act-atmos

To update an older version of ACT to the latest release use:

conda update -c conda-forge act-atmos

If you are using mamba:

mamba install -c conda-forge act-atmos

If you do not wish to use Anaconda or Miniconda as a Python environment or want to use the latest, unreleased version of ACT see the section below on Installing from source.

Installing from Source

Installing ACT from source is the only way to get the latest updates and enhancement to the software that have no yet made it into a release. The latest source code for ACT can be obtained from the GitHub repository, . Either download and unpack the zip file of the source code or use git to checkout the repository:

git clone https://github.com/ARM-DOE/ACT.git

Once you have the directory locally, you can install ACT in development mode using:

pip install -e .

If you want to install the repository directly, you can use:

pip install git+https://github.com/ARM-DOE/ACT.git

Contributing

ACT is an open source, community software project. Contributions to the package are welcomed from all users.

The latest source code can be obtained with the command:

git clone https://github.com/ARM-DOE/ACT.git

If you are planning on making changes that you would like included in ACT, forking the repository is highly recommended.

We welcome contributions for all uses of ACT, provided the code can be distributed under the BSD 3-clause license. A copy of this license is available in the LICENSE.txt file in this directory. For more on contributing, see the contributor's guide.

Testing

For testing, we use pytest for running the unit tests and arm-test-data for test files that are used for the unit tests. To install pytest:

$ conda install -c conda-forge pytest

And for matplotlib image testing with pytest:

$ conda install -c conda-forge pytest-mpl

To install arm-test-data:

$ conda install -c conda-forge arm-test-data

After installation of both pytest and arm-test-data, you can launch the test suite from outside the source directory (you will need to have pytest installed and for the mpl argument need pytest-mpl):

$ pytest --mpl --pyargs act

In-place installs can be tested using the pytest command from within the source directory.