Projects
Atmospheric Remote Sensing
Modular software development for atmospheric remote sensing
PI: Christian Frankenberg and Paul Wennberg (GPS and EAS Divisions)
SASE: Rupesh Jeyaram, Scholar
Atmospheric remote sensing is a powerful tool that enables researchers to understand climate processes on a global scale. For historic reasons, most of the scientific work in remote sensing was based on legacy code, written in older languages like Fortran, and mixed with “glue languages” such as Python. This convoluted situation had rendered important code bases impossible to read, edit, use, and improve by students and researchers. At Caltech, the Frankenberg and Wennberg labs study solar-induced fluorescence and atmospheric greenhouse gases such as methane and CO2. They – and other remote sensing labs on campus and JPL – had been using several software tools written in Fortran/C++.
The Schmidt Academy successfully worked with the Frankenberg/Wennberg labs to revamp and modernize these tools by developing an end-to-end modular software suite for atmospheric remote sensing. This software suite enables the computation of atmospheric optical properties, full polarized radiative transfer simulations, and commonly-used inversion routines. By taking advantage of modern software tools, such as GPU/TPU acceleration and HPC computing, the project significantly accelerated computationally-intensive calculations and models. Each module in the software suite was designed, developed, and tested independently, enabling flexibility in the ways that users can use the available tools. These key features and Julia’s easy-to-learn syntax significantly reduces the barrier-of-entry to atmospheric remote sensing while also advancing climate research.
Ultimately, rewriting and optimizing the groups’ radiative transfer codes dramatically improved computational performance, and is paving the way for new types of climate science and analysis.
vSmartMOM.jl
The software repository can be found here.
Documentation can be found here.
Sample absorption spectrum for CO2
Sample scattering phase function of aerosols