Robin's Blog

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 – if you don’t, then you can read the post-peer-review (but pre-publisher-typsetting) version at my website.

The paper describes the Py6S python module that I wrote to assist me in running simulations using the Second Simulation of the Satellite Signal in the Solar Spectrum (6S) model, and is fairly short, but – I hope – fairly useful. It also gives a good way for people to cite Py6S when (if…) they use it in their work – they simply cite this paper.

Of course, the issue with journal papers is that they are static – indeed, a number of things changed in Py6S during the time between submitting the paper and it coming out in print (which was around nine months!). None of those affected the example code given in the paper – and to be honest, they were mostly bugfixes – but there are some new features gradually working their way into the code.

I’m planning to start a series of posts about Py6S on this blog, showing how various things work ‘under the hood’, announcing new features, and showing examples of how to use Py6S well. Hopefully this will be useful for me and also useful for other people who may be interested in using Py6s, but may require a bit of help.

So… stay tuned for the next post which will be on a new feature involving user-defined spectra.

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This post originally appeared on Robin's Blog.

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Categorised as: Academic, My Software, Programming, Publications, Py6S, Python, Remote Sensing