NRC SPIFpy

NRC's Single Particle Image Format (SPIF) conversion utility. Version 1.0 (Release date 9 December, 2021)

About

NRC-SPIFpy is a set of Command Line Interface(CLI) tools which allow for the conversion of files stored in a variety of raw imaging probe formats to the SPIF format. The package is written in Python, and includes the following utilities:

• nrc-spifpy-extract: Convert a file in a raw imaging probe format to the SPIF format.
• nrc-spifpy-addaux: Add auxiliary data to a file in the SPIF format.
• nrc-spifpy-cc: Copy the configuration files required for processing with spifpy and spifaddaux.

Installation Requirements

• Python 3.6+
• Linux/MacOS : Any python environment manager (pyenv preferred)
• Windows : Anaconda Python Distribution(64-bit)

Installation is preferably done in a virtual environment

Installation

Linux/MacOS

$ git clone git@github.com:nrc-cnrc/NRC-SPIFpy.git
$ cd /path/to/spifpy
$ pip install .

For those who are actively developing NRC-SPIFpy, you can change the last line to pip install --editable ..

Windows

$ cd /path/to/spifpy
$ conda env create -f environment.yml
$ conda activate spifpy
$ pip install .

Example usage with 2DS imaging probe (SPEC Inc.)

1. Copy over required configuration files using nrc-spifpy-cc, and make any desired modifications to the config files. In this case, the config files will include 2DS.ini which defines config options for extracting and storing 2DS data, and also aux_config.ini, which specifies configuration options for adding auxiliary data.

$ nrc-spifpy-cc 2DS

1. Process the file of interest using nrc-spifpy-extract

$ nrc-spifpy-extract example_file.2DS 2DS.ini 

3. Add auxiliary information to the SPIF file using spifaddaux(optional), but only for the 2DS-V dataset.

$ nrc-spifpy-addaux example_file_2DS.nc auxiliary_file.nc -i 2DS-V -c aux_config.ini 

Supported probes

Currently the following Optical Array Probes (OAP) are supported:

• 2DC (Two Dimension Cloud particle imaging probe)
• 2DP (Two Dimension Precipitation particle imaging probe)
• 2DS (2D-Stereo, SPEC Inc.)
• CIP (Cloud Imaging Probe, DMT)
• PIP (Precipitation Imaging Probe, DMT)
• HVPS (High Volume Precipitation Spectrometer, SPEC Inc.)

Citations

• Bala, K., Freer, M., Bliankinshtein, N., Nichman, L., Shilin, S. and Wolde, M.: Standardized Imaging Probe Format and Algorithms: Implementation and Applications, 18th International Conference on Clouds and Precipitation (ICCP), Pune, India, 2-6 August, 2021.
• NRC Single Particle Image Format (SPIF) conversion utility, https://doi.org/10.4224/40002712, 2021

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge CloudSci LLC for the support in the development of this tool