pyRFU

pyrfu is an open-source Python package for in-situ space plasma data analysis, particularly of the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission.

It is distributed under the open-source MIT license.

Quickstart

Installing pyrfu with pip (more details here):

$ python -m pip install pyrfu
# or
$ python -m pip install --user pyrfu

Import pyrfu.mms package with routines specific to work with the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission (MMS)

from pyrfu import mms

Setup path to MMS data

mms.db_init(default="local", local="/Volumes/mms")

Load magnetic field and ion bulk velocity data

tint = ["2019-09-14T07:54:00.000", "2019-09-14T08:11:00.000"]
b_gsm = mms.get_data("b_gsm_fgm_srvy_l2", tint, 1)
v_gse_i = mms.get_data("vi_gse_fpi_fast_l2", tint, 1)

Import pyrfu.pyrf package with generic routines

from pyrfu import pyrf

Transform ion bulk velocity to geocentric solar magnetospheric (GSM) coordinates

v_gsm_i = pyrf.cotrans(v_gse_i, "gse>gsm")

Import pyrfu.plot package with plotting routines

from pyrfu.plot import plot_line

Plot time series of magnetic field and ion bulk velocity

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

f, axs = plt.subplots(2, sharex="all")
plot_line(axs[0], b_gsm)
axs[0].set_ylabel("$B~[\\mathrm{nT}]$")
axs[0].legend(["$B_{x}$", "$B_{y}$", "$B_{z}$"], ncol=4)

plot_line(axs[1], v_gsm_i)
axs[1].set_ylabel("$V_i~[\\mathrm{km}~\\mathrm{s}^{-1}]$")
axs[1].legend(["$V_{ix}$", "$V_{iy}$", "$V_{iz}$"], ncol=4)

Documentation

Full documentation can be found on pyrfu.readthedocs.io

Examples

A list of examples is available here

Credits

This software was developed by Louis RICHARD at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF) in Uppsala, where it started from the IRFU-MATLAB library, and is now maintained by Louis RICHARD at the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford (louis.richard@physics.ox.ac.uk).

Acknowledgement

If pyrfu contributes to work leading to a publication, please cite it and give the version you used (pyrfu.__version__), for example in the acknowledgements or the methods section:

Data analysis was performed using the open-source pyrfu package (Richard et al., 2024), version X.Y.Z.

Reference:

Richard, L., Khotyaintsev, Y. V., Vaivads, A., Graham, D. B., Norgren, C., & Johlander, A. (2024). Python RymdFysik Utilities (PyRFU): An open-source Python package for advanced in-situ space plasma analysis [Software]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10678695

BibTeX:

@software{richard2024pyrfu,
  author    = {Richard, Louis and Khotyaintsev, Yuri V. and Vaivads, Andris and
               Graham, Daniel B. and Norgren, Cecilia and Johlander, Andreas},
  title     = {Python RymdFysik Utilities (PyRFU): An Open-Source Python Package
               for Advanced In-Situ Space Plasma Analysis},
  year      = {2024},
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.10678695},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10678695}
}

The same metadata is in CITATION.cff (GitHub's "Cite this repository"). Many routines implement published methods, given in the References section of their documentation: please cite those as well, and acknowledge the data you use following the policy of each mission (for MMS, the instrument teams and the MMS Science Data Center).