Collective optical Thomson scattering (TS) is a diagnostic commonly used to
characterize plasma parameters. These parameters are typically extracted by a
fitting algorithm that minimizes the difference between a measured scattered
spectrum and an analytic spectrum calculated from the velocity distribution
function (VDF) of the plasma. However, most existing TS analysis algorithms
assume the VDFs are Maxwellian, and applying an algorithm which makes this
assumption does not accurately extract the plasma parameters of a
non-Maxwellian plasma due to the effect of non-Maxwellian deviations on the TS
spectra. We present new open-source numerical tools for forward modeling
analytic spectra from arbitrary VDFs, and show that these tools are able to
more accurately extract plasma parameters from synthetic TS spectra generated
by non-Maxwellian VDFs compared to standard TS algorithms. Estimated posterior
probability distributions of fits to synthetic spectra for a variety of example
non-Maxwellian VDFs are used to determine uncertainties in the extracted plasma
parameters, and show that correlations between parameters can significantly
affect the accuracy of fits in plasmas with non-Maxwellian VDFs