SSUSI F16 EDR-DSK format to observation sequence converters¶
Overview¶
The Special Sensor Ultraviolet Spectrographic Imager SSUSI is designed to remotely sense the ionosphere and thermosphere. The following is repeated from the SSUSI home page:
Overview Beginning in 2003, the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) satellites began carrying the SSUSI instrument - a combination of spectrographic imaging and photometric systems designed to remotely sense the ionosphere and thermosphere. The long term focus of the SSUSI program is to provide data concerning the upper atmospheric response to the sun over the changing conditions of the solar cycle. Data collected by SSUSI instrument can help identify structure in the equatorial and polar regions. Mission SSUSI was designed for the DMSP Block 5D-3 satellites. These satellites are placed into nearly polar, sun-synchronous orbits at an altitude of about 850 km. SSUSI is a remote-sensing instrument which measures ultraviolet (UV) emissions in five different wavelength bands from the Earth’s upper atmosphere. SSUSI is mounted on a nadir-looking panel of the satellite. The multicolor images from SSUSI cover the visible Earth disk from horizon to horizon and the anti-sunward limb up to an altitude of approximately 520 km. The UV images and the derived environmental data provide the Air Force Weather Agency (Offutt Air Force Base, Bellevue, NE) with near real-time information that can be utilized in a number of applications, such as maintenance of high frequency (HF) communication links and related systems and assessment of the environmental hazard to astronauts on the Space Station.
convert_f16_edr_dsk.f90
will extract the ON2 observations from the F16 “edr-dsk” format files and create DART
observation sequence files. There is one additional preprocessing step before the edr-dsk files may be converted.ncatted -a _FillValue,ON2_UNCERTAINTY,o,f,NaN input_file.nc
ncatted -a _FillValue,ON2_UNCERTAINTY,m,f,-1.0 input_file.nc
Programs¶
DART/observations/SSUSI/convert_f16_edr_dsk.f90
will extract ON2 data from the distribution files and create DART
observation sequence (obs_seq) files. Build it in the SSUSI/work
directory by running the ./quickbuild.csh
script located there. In addition to the converters, the advance_time
and obs_sequence_tool
utilities will be
built.
An example data file is in the data
directory. An example scripts for adding the required metadata to the
ON2_UNCERTAINTY variable in the shell_scripts
directory. These are NOT intended to be turnkey scripts; they will
certainly need to be customized for your use. There are comments at the top of the scripts saying what options they
include, and should be commented enough to indicate where changes will be likely to need to be made.
Errors¶
The code for setting observation error variances is using fixed values, and we are not certain if they are correct. Incoming QC values larger than 0 are suspect, but it is not clear if they really signal unusable values or whether there are some codes we should accept.