ATPAD: An Accessible Tool for RUOA-UNAM Atmospheric Data Processing and Visualization
Several regions of the world are making an effort to meet the atmospheric monitoring needs of each region to generate accurate information for the study of meteorology, climate change, and air quality. Monitoring networks generate a large amount of information that needs to be stored, validated, corrected, and interpreted, however, practical tools are not always available for the development of these activities without the need to resort to highly trained personnel, thus limiting the way the general population's access to atmospheric monitoring information. This work presents a tool for the basic processing and visualization of atmospheric monitoring data, specifically from the University Network of Atmospheric Observatories (RUOA) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. ATPAD (Accessible Tool for Processing Atmospheric RUOA Data) is a project developed in Python that allows the manipulation and visualization of pre-processed databases in an easy and freely accessible way.
To make the user experience easier, we suggest creating the following directories within the working directory. This will allow for an organized management of input and output files without requiring significant modifications to the code.
METEO_RAW: For meteorological input data.
POLLUTION_RAW: For atmospheric pollution input data.
PARQUET_FILES: For pre-processed data in Parquet format.
OUTPUT_FILES: For output files in CSV format.
The notebook PREP_ATPAD takes files from the METEO_RAW and POLLUTION_RAW directories to merge them into two dataframes: meteo and pollution. It then formats the column names and generates parquet format files, which will be stored in the PARQUET_FILES directory.
The METEO_ATPAD and POLLUTION_ATPAD notebooks take input files from PARQUET_FILES and apply:
- Data cleaning and validation
- Outlier handling
Cleaned datasets can be filtered by station and time range.
Available features:
- Compute 24-hour averages (with 75% completeness).
- Generate diurnal cycles (hourly medians).
Processed datasets can be saved as CSV files in the OUTPUT_ATPAD folder.
VIEW_ATPAD.ipynb provides basic visualization tools for pollution and meteorological datasets previously processed with ATPAD.
The notebook allows users to:
- Load cleaned pollution and meteorology CSV output files.
- Select and filter data by time period and region.
- Generate a variety of exploratory plots, including:
- Wind roses and pollution roses.
- Histograms and violin plots for both meteorology and pollution data.
- Time series of pollutants and meteorological parameters across regions.
This project is licensed under the MIT License (Non-Commercial).
Use of this software is restricted to non-commercial purposes.