This topic provides 3 practical videos from Anu-Maija demonstrating the use of the Atmosphere Toolbox. The ESA Atmospheric Toolbox project is an open source software for scientific analysis of atmospheric EO data. The Atmospheric Toolbox aims to provide scientists with tools for ingesting, processing, and analyzing atmospheric remote sensing data.

In this tutorial the VISAN tool is used. VISAN is a visualization and analysis tool for atmospheric data, which allows for reading product data from atmospheric instruments from missions such as Sentinel-5P, Aeolus, GOME-2, IASI, and OMI, as well as from model data such as from CAMS, or ground based data such as those provided NDACC and EVDC. VISAN uses the Python language to provide commands to the application and accepts import data formats including NetCDF, HDF4, HDF5 and XML.  

To install VISAN you must first install Anaconda which you can do so here. Once installed, open 'Anaconda powercell prompt'. Which will open an Anaconda command window. Firstly type in the following commands:

 conda create -n visan

and then:

conda activate visan

‍this will activate a conda environment. Next we can install VISAN in the environment by running the following command:

conda install -c stcorp-forge -c conda-forge visan

This will automatically also install the CODA and HARP software as dependencies in the same environment.

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In this first part of the Tutorial, you will learn how to import TROPOMI NO₂ data using HARP in Python in VISAN. HARP is a Python package that provides a set of functions to import and export HARP products. HARP products can be HARP format (HDF4, HDF5, or netCDF) or non-HARP products of a type supported by HARP.

In this tutorial you will work through the following steps:

1. Define a 'myfile' variable that contains the full path of the data file to be imported
2. Use the 'harp.import()' command to import the 'myfile' path
3. Print the contents of the imported file using the 'print()' command to give the list of variables which are included in the file
4. Add operations to HARP import
5. Plot in VISAN using the 'wplot()' command

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Featured Educator:

• Dr Anu-Maija Sundström, Research Scientist, FMI

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