pyDARN: A Python software for visualizing SuperDARN radar data

The Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN) is an international network of high frequency coherent scatter radars that are used for monitoring the electrodynamics of the Earth's upper atmosphere at middle, high, and polar latitudes in both hemispheres. pyDARN is an open-source Python-based library developed specifically for visualizing SuperDARN radar data products. It provides various plotting functions of different types of SuperDARN data, including time series plot, range-time parameter plot, fields of view, full scan, and global convection map plots. In this paper, we review the different types of SuperDARN data products, pyDARN's development history and goals, the current implementation of pyDARN, and various plotting and analysis functionalities. We also discuss applications of pyDARN, how it can be combined with other existing Python software for scientific analysis, challenges for pyDARN development and future plans. Examples showing how to read, visualize, and interpret different SuperDARN data products using pyDARN are provided as a Jupyter notebook.

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Related Dataset #1 : Dataset and Jupyter notebook for "pyDARN: A Python Software for Visualizing SuperDARN Radar Data"

Related Software #1 : SciTools/cartopy: v0.21.1

Related Software #2 : SuperDARN/pydarn: pyDARN v1.0.0 release

Related Software #3 : vtsuperdarn/davitpy: Final release of davitpy

Related Software #4 : aburrell/aacgmv2: Version 2.6.2

Related Software #5 : SuperDARN/pyDARNio: pyDARNio v1.1.1

Related Software #6 : SuperDARN/pydarn: pyDARN v3.0

Related Software #7 : SuperDARN Radar Software Toolkit (RST) 4.7

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Author Shi, Xueling
Schmidt, Marina
Martin, Carley J.
Billett, Daniel D.
Bland, Emma
Tholley, Francis H.
Frissell, Nathaniel A.
Khanal, Krishna
Coyle, Shane
Chakraborty, Shibaji
Detwiller, Marci
Kunduri, Bharat
McWilliams, Kathryn
Publisher UCAR/NCAR - Library
Publication Date 2022-12-01T00:00:00
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Not Assigned
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Topic Category geoscientificInformation
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Metadata Date 2023-08-18T18:42:38.999165
Metadata Record Identifier edu.ucar.opensky::articles:25960
Metadata Language eng; USA
Suggested Citation Shi, Xueling, Schmidt, Marina, Martin, Carley J., Billett, Daniel D., Bland, Emma, Tholley, Francis H., Frissell, Nathaniel A., Khanal, Krishna, Coyle, Shane, Chakraborty, Shibaji, Detwiller, Marci, Kunduri, Bharat, McWilliams, Kathryn. (2022). pyDARN: A Python software for visualizing SuperDARN radar data. UCAR/NCAR - Library. http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7bg2svj. Accessed 01 July 2025.

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