6 research outputs found
The SunPy Project: An Interoperable Ecosystem for Solar Data Analysis
The SunPy Project is a community of scientists and software developers
creating an ecosystem of Python packages for solar physics. The project
includes the sunpy core package as well as a set of affiliated packages. The
sunpy core package provides general purpose tools to access data from different
providers, read image and time series data, and transform between commonly used
coordinate systems. Affiliated packages perform more specialized tasks that do
not fall within the more general scope of the sunpy core package. In this
article, we give a high-level overview of the SunPy Project, how it is broader
than the sunpy core package, and how the project curates and fosters the
affiliated package system. We demonstrate how components of the SunPy
ecosystem, including sunpy and several affiliated packages, work together to
enable multi-instrument data analysis workflows. We also describe members of
the SunPy Project and how the project interacts with the wider solar physics
and scientific Python communities. Finally, we discuss the future direction and
priorities of the SunPy Project.Comment: 15 pages, 1 figure, published in Frontier
SunPy - Python for Solar Physics
This paper presents SunPy (version 0.5), a community-developed Python package for solar physics. Python, a free, cross-platform, general-purpose, high-level programming language, has seen widespread adoption among the scientific community, resulting in the availability of a large number of software packages, from numerical computation (NumPy, SciPy) and machine learning (scikit-learn) to visualisation and plotting (matplotlib). SunPy is a data-analysis environment specialising in providing the software necessary to analyse solar and heliospheric data in Python. SunPy is open-source software (BSD licence) and has an open and transparent development workflow that anyone can contribute to. SunPy provides access to solar data through integration with the Virtual Solar Observatory (VSO), the Heliophysics Event Knowledgebase (HEK), and the HELiophysics Integrated Observatory (HELIO) webservices. It currently supports image data from major solar missions (e.g., SDO, SOHO, STEREO, and IRIS), time-series data from missions such as GOES, SDO/EVE, and PROBA2/LYRA, and radio spectra from e-Callisto and STEREO/SWAVES. We describe SunPy's functionality, provide examples of solar data analysis in SunPy, and show how Python-based solar data-analysis can leverage the many existing tools already available in Python. We discuss the future goals of the project and encourage interested users to become involved in the planning and development of SunPy