Posts by Zach Sherman
Working with multiple ARM files and Xarray
- 02 June 2026
When working with multiple ARM files such as the datastream sgpmfrsraod1michE13.c1, errors can occur depending on the parameters used to read in the files. ACT uses xarray open_mfdataset to read in multiple files and feeds these parameters into the xarray function. Parameters such as combine (how xarray combines the files), data_vars (whether to attempt to combine all variables despite dimensions), and much more. Depending on how coordinates and dimensions are in the files, such as multiple dimensions outside of time, the default reader in ACT and xarray can fail.
Lets start by looking at one singular file in for our sgpmfrsraod1michE13.c1 datastream:
Visualize and compare data from the SAIL campaign and NOAA
- 07 October 2022
When reading and analyzing data, its is useful to bring together data from different organizations. This not only expands the data available for scientists and their research, but is also useful for quality controls checks. In this notebook, we look at both the datasets produce by ARM instruments in the SAIL campaign as well as instruments provided by NOAA at their KPS site near the SAIL campaign location.
By comparing these datasets, we can see similar and differences between the two datasets, but overall the structure is comparable. We can see the usefulness of ACT to not only read ARM datasets, but datasets outside of ARM. These workflows allow for scientists to have many different tools to use different datasets for their research, as well as quality control checks which increases the confidence in the quality and calibration of the instrumentation.
