Robin's Blog

Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category

Can I atmospherically-correct my images with Py6S?

I’m a big fan of Matt Might’s blog, and thought I’d implement one of his tips for blogging as an academic – namely Reply to Public. I’ve had a number of emails from Py6S users asking me questions about how to atmospherically-correct entire satellite images with Py6S – so I thought ‘d respond online, so that […]

Py6S: Run a radiative transfer model with a user-defined input spectrum

Version 1.2 of Py6S has recently been released (including a couple of bug fix releases, taking the most recent version to v1.2.2), and the major new feature in this version is the ability to use any spectrum as the ground reflectance for a model run. Previously, users were restricted to using the built-in 6S ground […]

My first academic paper – on Py6S

Another exciting update for this new year: my first academic journal paper has been published! It’s called Py6S: A Python interface to the 6S Radiative Transfer Model, and is published in Computers and Geosciences. If you’re reading this from a university with a subscription to Computers and Geosciences then you can read it at ScienceDirect – […]

I signed the Science Code Manifesto – and you should too!

I’ve just signed the Science Code Manifesto because I firmly believe in what it says. Ok well, that probably doesn’t tell you much – generally I tend to believe in things that I sign – but I’d like to tell you why I signed it, and why I think it’s really important. A lot of […]

In praise of ProjectTemplate for reproducible research

As you might know from some of my previous posts, I’m a big fan of making my scientific work reproducible. My main reasons for being so keen on this are: Reproducibility is key to science – if it can’t be reproduced then it can not be verified (that is, the experiment can’t be tried again to […]

Producing polar contour plots with matplotlib

In my field I often need to plot polar contour plots, and generally plotting tools don’t make this easy. In fact, I think I could rate every single graphing/plotting package in the world by the ease of producing a polar contour plot – and most would fail entirely! Still, I have managed to find a […]

John Snow’s famous cholera analysis data in modern GIS formats

In 1854 there was a massive cholera outbreak in Soho, London – in three days over 120 people died from the disease. Famously, John Snow plotted the locations of the deaths on a map and found they clustered around a pump in Broad Street – he suggested that the pump be taken out of service […]