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A Python package to simplify working with EarthCARE satellite data.

Caution

Project Status: In Development

This project is still under active development. It is not yet feature-complete, and parts of the user documentation are missing or incomplete. Use at your own risk and expect breaking changes. Feedback and contributions are welcome!

What is earthcarekit?

earthcarekit is an open-source Python package that provides comprehensive and flexible tools for downloading, reading, analysing and visualizing data from ESA (European Space Ageny) and JAXA's (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) joint satellite mission EarthCARE (Earth Cloud, Aerosol and Radiation Explorer, Wehr et al., 2023). The goal of this software is to support the diverse calibration/validation (cal/val) and scientific efforts related to the mission and provide easy-to-use functions for new EarthCARE data users.

Key Features

  • ⬇️ Download - Access EarthCARE data via the command line or your Python scripts.
  • 🔍 Search & Read - Search your local EarthCARE products and open them as xarray.Dataset objects with unified dimension names.
  • ⚙️ Process - Make use of a comprehensive set of functions, including filtering by time or geographic location, extracting vertical profile statistics, rebinning, along-track interpolation from X-MET files, and merging consecutive EarthCARE datasets, and more.
  • 📊 Visualize - Create quicklooks and plot vertical and across-track time series using a set of matplotlib/cartopy-based figure objects - while allowing customization.
  • 💻 Command-Line Interface Tools:
    • ecdownload - Search, select, and download EarthCARE data from a terminal.
    • ecquicklook - Create fast preview visualisations of EarthCARE datasets from a terminal.

Contact

The package is developed and maintained by Leonard König at Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS). For questions, suggestions, or bug reports, please create an issue or reach out via email.

Acknowledgments

Colormap definitions for calipso and chiljet2 were adapted from the exellent ectools repository by Shannon Mason (ECMWF).

Citation

If you use this software in your work, please cite it. We recommend citing the specific version you are using, which you can select on Zenodo.

Alternatively, if you want to cite version-independent use:

@software{koenig_2025_earthcarekit,
  author       = {König, Leonard and
                  Floutsi, Athena Augusta and
                  Haarig, Moritz and
                  Baars, Holger and
                  Wandinger, Ulla},
  title        = {earthcarekit: A Python package to simplify working
                   with EarthCARE satellite data
                  },
  month        = aug,
  year         = 2025,
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.16813294},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16813294},
}

or in text:

König, L., Floutsi, A. A., Haarig, M., Baars, H., & Wandinger, U. (2025). earthcarekit: A Python package to simplify working with EarthCARE satellite data. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16813294

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License (see LICENSE file or https://opensource.org/license/mit).

Third-Party Licenses

This project relies on several open-source packages. Their licenses include:

Please refer to each project's repository for detailed license information.

References

  • Wehr, T., Kubota, T., Tzeremes, G., Wallace, K., Nakatsuka, H., Ohno, Y., Koopman, R., Rusli, S., Kikuchi, M., Eisinger, M., Tanaka, T., Taga, M., Deghaye, P., Tomita, E., and Bernaerts, D.: The EarthCARE mission – science and system overview, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 16, 3581–3608, https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-16-3581-2023, 2023.