Robin's Blog

Archive for the ‘Academic’ Category

Deprecating AutoZotBib

One of the most important things when developing software – particularly open-source software – is knowing when to stop working on something, relinquish responsibility and suggest that it should not be used any more. This is what I have recently done with AutoZotBib. For those who don’t remember AutoZotBib, it is a tool that I […]

Behind the paper: Are visibility-derived AOT estimates suitable for parameterising satellite data atmospheric correction algorithms?

This has been a bit slow coming, but I am now sticking to my promise to write a Behind the paper post for each of my published academic papers. This is about: Wilson, R. T., E. J. Milton, and J. M. Nield (2015). Are visibility-derived AOT estimates suitable for parameterising satellite data atmospheric correction algorithms? International Journal of Remote […]

Previously Unpublicised Code: PyMicrotops

Continuing my series of code that I’ve written in the past, and stuck up on Github, but never actually talked about…this post is about PyMicrotops: a Python library for processing data from the Microtops Sun Photometer. The Microtops (pictured above) measures light coming from the sun in a number of narrow wavebands, and then calculates […]

van Heuklon ozone model now available on PyPI and conda

I was going to post this as one of my ‘previously unpublicised code’ posts, but that would be stretching the title a bit, as I have previously blogged about my implementation of the van Heuklon (1979) ozone model. This is just a brief update (in the spirit of my ‘previously unpublicised code’ posts) to say that […]

Orthogonal Distance Regression in Python

Linear regression is often used to estimate the relationship between two variables – basically by drawing the ‘line of best fit’ on a graph. The mathematical method that is used for this is known as Least Squares, and aims to minimise the sum of the squared error for each point. The key question here is how do […]

Previously Unpublicised Code: RTWIDL

When looking through my profile on Github recently, I realised that I had over fifty repositories – and a number of these weren’t really used much by me anymore, but probably contained useful code that no-one really knows about! So, I’m going to write a series of posts giving brief descriptions of the code and […]

Blue Marble: From Apollo 17 to DSCOVR, an EPIC journey

NASA image ID AS17-148-22727 is famous. Although you may not recognise the number, you will almost certainly recognise the image: This was taken by NASA Apollo astronauts on the 7th December 1972, while the Apollo 17 mission was on its way to the moon. It has become one of the most famous photographs ever taken, and has […]

How I became Dr Robin Wilson: Part 2

At the end of the previous post in this series, I was six months into my PhD and worrying that I really needed to come up with an overarching topic/framework/story/something into which all of the various bits of research that I was doing would fit. This part is the story of how I managed to […]

Interactive cloud frequency web map, with Google Earth Engine

Summary: I’ve developed an interactive cloud frequency map, available here. It may be particularly useful for satellite imaging researchers working out where they can acquire imagery easily. One of the major issues with optical satellite imaging is that you can’t see through clouds: so normally when its cloudy, you can’t get anything useful from your images. […]