Chasing the Black Smoke: Building Software for CALIPSO Satellite Data to Aid in Tracking and Identifying Sources of Aerosols and their Impact on the Earth’s Climate

Abstract:

The Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) satellite is a NASA Earth observation that analyzes aerosol particles suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere. Researchers use visualized CALIPSO data to track the global distribution, dispersion, and source of aerosols. There currently exists a tool for displaying CALIPSO data, but this tool does not support needed features for tracking aerosols such as selecting regions of data and sharing those selected regions, making tracking specific airborne objects difficult for researchers. Adding these necessary features to the current CALIPSO visualization tool is difficult, as the tool is written in Interactive Data Language (IDL), a proprietary and obscure language and writing additional features for the tool would require a specialized development team. This topic will focus on release of a new tool for visualization CALIPSO’s atmospheric data, or the Visualization of CALIPSO (VOCAL) open source Python program. The talk will explain why VOCAL will serve as the successor to the current visualization tool for CALIPSO data, what new features VOCAL brings to the table for researchers, and how this new tool can further support the tracking and identification of aerosols in the Earth’s atmosphere.