Abstract
NASA’s Atmospheric Tomography Mission (ATom) deployed in each of the
four seasons during 2016-2018, the DC-8 aircraft in order to establish
global-scale datasets intended to improve the representation of
chemically reactive gases in global atmospheric chemistry models (ACMs).
The Global Modeling Initiative (GMI) executed simulations for each ATom
flight using the GMI Chemistry Transport Model (GMI-CTM) to provide
species concentrations of chemical gases along the DC-8 flight
transects. To solve the problem of translating the GMI-CTM simulation
data to the unique spatial resolutions of each ATom flight, the GMI
ICARTT Processing Software (GMI-IPS) was developed. The GMI-IPS is
written in Python and provides data processing, flight extraction, and
visualization support for aircraft research projects using ICARTT
format, which is a standard format for airborne instrument data.
Additionally, the GMI-IPS interpolates global gridded model data from
Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) to ICARTT flight transects. Software
classes for instruments and collections provided by the ATom DC-8
aircraft such as MER10, MMS, etc. are derived from a common base class.
Other functionality provided by the GMI-IPS are: deriving missing flight
entries along a transect, reading ICARTT entries from file, providing
Python data structures for storing flight and model information, and
more. The GMI-IPS is GIT source controlled, has approximately 30,000
lines of code, and supports parallelization across data collections. It
delivered GMI-CTM data for more than forty distinct DC-8 aircraft
flights that took place under ATom. The output ICARTT files adhere to
format standard V1.1, and pass the scan utility provided by NASA LaRC
Airborne Science Data for Atmospheric Composition. This presentation
will include a software and methods overview, and results from ATom,
including assessments using the GMI-CTM showing how well observations
from ATom flight transects represent a broader region.