Aerosol distribution display. - ARM Summer School 2026

[marositesUSC]

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[zssherman]

Hi @marositesUSC , would this be a new feature request?

[marositesUSC]

Hi, @zssherman , yes this is a new feature request.

I am at the ARM Summer School, and @jrobrien91 suggested I submit this. I didn't add any additional details (my apologies). But I am trying to plot aerosol size distributions. I am using the N_ccn data from 'sgpaosccn2colbE13.b1' and 'sgpaosccn2colaavgE13.b1'.

[zssherman]

@marositesUSC Ah gotcha!

This code block might help, could you try this and adjust for your dataset:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
from arm_test_data import DATASETS

import act

# Read CCN data in from the test data area
filename_ccn = DATASETS.fetch('sgpaosccn2colaE13.b1.20170903.000000.nc')
ds = act.io.arm.read_arm_netcdf(filename_ccn)

# Create a DistributionDisplay object
display = act.plotting.DistributionDisplay(ds, subplot_shape=(2,), figsize=(12, 10))

# Create a size distribution plot while plotting the
# size distribution in the second plot
t_ind = np.datetime64('2017-09-03T15:47:31')
display.plot_size_distribution('N_CCN_dN', 'droplet_size', time=t_ind, subplot_index=(0,))

# This part shows how you can use different display types in a single plot
# by assigning the new display object to a figure and axes from the first one.
display2 = act.plotting.TimeSeriesDisplay(ds)
display2.assign_to_figure_axis(display.fig, display.axes[1])
display2.plot('N_CCN_dN')

plt.show()

[marositesUSC]

Cool!

Also, wanted to expand this. We wanted to explore 2 months of data. We were using this datastream and date range.

ccn_datastream = 'sgpaosccn2colaavgE13.b1'

startdate = '2019-11-01'
enddate = '2019-12-31'

result_ccn = act.discovery.download_arm_data(arm_username, arm_token, ccn_datastream, startdate, enddate)

[zssherman]

@marositesUSC The act reader should take multiple files and stack them on time etc, if you provide the result_ccn into the:

ds = act.io.arm.read_arm_netcdf(result_ccn)

it should work