Data Requests

If you are interested in overview plots, check out the Quick Browse page.
Custom plotting of standard SuperDARN data products is available in our interactive plotting page.
We are also happy to help, so if you have special/large requests or just a question concerning SuperDARN data for use in scientific analysis and publications, please contact any of the members of our group.

Data Access : Fitacf-level data

Data at the fitacf level represents the results of fitting backscatter returns for each beam and range gate of a radar to obtain power, line-of-sight velocity, and spectral width, among many other parameters. These data are the basis for further processing to obtain gridded velocity averages and fittings of the global convection pattern. Data at this level are stored in files named as fitacf and fitex.

The fitacf-level data can be viewed on a radar-by-radar basis with the graphical tools 'Range-Time Plot' and 'Scan (f-o-v) Plot' from the 'Data Plotting' submenu.

There are several options for obtaining data at the fitacf level:
1) For brief, one-radar summaries, use the 'Print Fit Records' utility under the 'Data Diagnostics' submenu to generate an ASCII file of fitacf-level data for a given radar and time interval
2) Contact us to have fitacf-level files staged up into a shared folder
3) Contact us to set up a shell account on our network to support direct download of fitacf files
4) Download and install DaViTPy. There are routines which will automatically contact our servers and fetch the data simply by giving the radar and the date. The data is loaded into python and can then be used immediately with the python toolkit. Data can be exported into IDL SAV files or ASCII text. All of this happens through an SFTP account which has the username/password distributed in Davitpy. In principle, the user can bypass all of python, just use the SFTP account, and download whatever data they want. We provide interactive Notebooks which walk the user through loading data.

---