Airborne data processing and analysis software package

The practice of conducting quality control and quality assurance in the construction of data sets is often an overlooked and underestimated task of many research projects in the Earth Sciences. The development of software to effectively process and quickly analyze measurements is a critical aspect of a research project. An evolutionary approach has been used at the University of North Dakota to develop and implement software to process and analyze airborne measurements. Development over the past eight years has resulted in a collection of software named the Airborne Data Processing and Analysis (ADPAA) package which has been published as an open source project on Source Forge. The ADPAA package is intended to fully automate data processing while incorporating the concept of missing value codes and levels of data processing. At each data level, ADPAA utilizes a standard ASCII file format to store measurements from individual instruments into separate files. After all data levels have been processed, a summary file containing parameters of scientific interest for the field project is created for each aircraft flight. All project information is organized into a standard directory structure. ADPAA contains several tools that facilitate quality control procedures conducted on instruments during field projects and laboratory testing. Each quality control procedure is designed to ensure proper instrument performance and hence the validity of the instrument’s measurement. Data processing by ADPAA allows edit files to be created that are automatically used to insert missing value codes into a time period that had instrument problems. The creation of edit files is typically done after the completion of a field project when scientists are performing quality assurance of the data set. Since data processing is automatic, preliminary data can be created and analyzed within hours of an aircraft flight and a complete field project data set can be reprocessed many times during the quality assurance process. Once a final data set has been created, ADPAA provides several tools for visualization and analysis. In addition to aircraft data, ADPAA can be used on any data set that is based on time series measurements. The concepts illustrated by ADPAA and components of ADPAA, such as the Cplot visualization tool, are applicable to areas of Earth Science that work with time series measurements.