ACT for Science

Description

The Atmospheric data Community Toolkit (ACT) has been growing since it first began in 2018 with features added to all modules; Discovery, Input/Output, Corrections, Quality Control, Retrievals, and Plotting. The ARM Data Quality Office and ARM Data Center are currently using, and greatly contributing to, this library for quality inspection, visualization and quicklook generation greatly streamlining the number of different code-bases to manage. ACT is getting broad usage across ARM infrastructure but we want ACT for Science to further engage with ARM data users and highlight the benefits to using and contributing back to ACT. While ARM is a focus area of the package, the goal is to bridge the gap with other communities like NOAA, AmeriFlux, and NEON. ACT is looking to enable this by developing functions for easily downloading and working with other organizations data, for example NOAA PSL data from SAIL, expanding the available set of retrievals with some of them mimicking ARM Value Added Product algorithms for greater transparency and flexibility when analyzing data, and providing examples on how this can be done using ACT.

In addition to expanding ACT’s role in the science community the developer team supporting Py-ART helped to lead and plan the 2022 Open Science Workshop seeing unexpected levels of attendance (128 attendees). As part of this workshop, a number of tutorials were given from basics of Python, GitHub and Jupyter Notebooks, ACT and Py-ART, to ARM/ASR community developed software packages like the Earth Model Column Collaboratory. The tutorials, all in Jupyter Notebooks, are all available online in the ARM-Develop organization under ARM-Notebooks that the user community can continue to use for educational purposes.