Atmospheric Inputs

This package aims to integrate easily into the pangeo suite of applications. In view of that, atmospheric inputs are required to be passed in as xarray Dataset objects. Along with the Dataset, a user can pass in a dictionary with maps fixed names to the variable names in the file. The required keys are:

user_dictionary = {
    "play": "<name of the pressure variable in the dataset>",
    "tlay": "<name of the temperature variable in the dataset>",
    "mole_fraction": {
        "H2O": "<name of the water vapor variable in the dataset>",
        "CO2": "<name of the carbon dioxide variable in the dataset>",
        "O3": "<name of the ozone variable in the dataset>",
        "CH4": "<name of the methane variable in the dataset>",
        "N2O": "<name of the nitrous oxide variable in the dataset>",
        "CO": "<name of the carbon monoxide variable in the dataset>",
        # Other molecules of interest if desired.
    }
}

If the user does not pass in the dictionary, the application attempts to “discover” the correct variables in the Dataset by examining the variables’ CF standard_name attributes:

Variable	standard_name Attribute	Expected Units
pressure	“air_pressure”	“Pa”
temperature	“air_temperature”	“K”
mole fraction of molecule xxx	“mole_fraction_of_xxx_in_air”	“mol mol-1”

In either case, if the variables in the Dataset do not have the expected units, the application will not function properly.