The Python Satellite Data Analysis Toolkit: Building Towards an Integrated Future

A common problem in space science data analysis is combining complementary data sources that are provided and analyzed in different formats and programming languages. The Python Satellite Data Analysis Toolkit (pysat) addresses this issue by providing an open source toolkit that implements the general process of space science data analysis, from beginning to end, in an instrument-independent manner. This toolkit uses an Instrument object that enables systematic analysis of science data from a variety of platforms within a single interface, abstracting away the tedious details of file and data handling. The generality enabled by the Instrument object may be used to construct analysis routines that are data source independent. In particular, this has been used to create a seasonal bin averaging routine that works on all data sources, even with varied dimensionality.

Pysat's functions and higher-level scientific analysis features are validated through the use of unit testing. Further adoption by the community provides a set of scientific results produced by a common core, constituting a distributed heritage that supports the validity of the underlying processing and scientific output. Pysat builds upon open source Python software that is freely available and encourages community-driven development.