Aspen

placeholder - released to Air Force Jan 2026

• Build environment tweaks to build on CentOS 7
• No functional change from V4.0.5.

• Update default wind smoothing wavelength (to 5s) for mini-dropsonde config set
• Update default sonde mass (to 169g) and drag coefficient (to 0.57) for mini-dropsonde config set
• Fix default values in the Aspen-supplied stock configuration XML so parameter settings will be the same between installing Aspen on a fresh system and when resetting to defaults from the Configuration menu

• Add check to remove RH values that do not have an associated temperature at the end of QC processing
• Remove logic to retain the last point in each data series, even if it failed CRC check
• Add buttons to set Skew-T display bounds to preset values for common aircraft altitudes
• Add minimum equilibration time threshold of 6 seconds for temperature and RH equilibration calculations
• Add configuration set name to Summary tab
• Update autosaved WMO text (in addition to the WMO tab display) when the user makes modifications in the Comm tab
• Add a User Modifications section to the Summary tab to record manual QC changes during processing
  
  • In Main tab, log ignored or overridden launch parameters, changes to dropsonde hit surface or surface altitude unknown checkboxes, surface altitude or pressure overrides, heights set to missing, and end of drop time overrides
  • In Raw tab, log changes to end of drop time, and points flagged as keep or ignore
  • In Comm tab, log the sonde environment set by the user (if present)
  • The user modifications text section is also added to global attributes in netCDF and CSV output, with one caveat: due to Aspen architecture limitations, netCDF and CSV data will not be updated when the user modifies the sonde environment in the Comm tab, unless the user manually recomputes

• Updates to build on MacOS Ventura

• Add user settable option for whether to discard sonde frames with the wrong sonde ID in ACS files
• Flag lines with the wrong sonde ID (ACS files only) in the Raw tab, and collect stats on number of bad lines

• Add trajectory plot option for Lat-Lon XY Graph tab: added Lat as default Y axis for this plot
• Add ability to select entire columns in the Raw tab by clicking the column headers
• Add Ctrl+E keyboard shortcut (Cmd+E on Mac) to jump to the end of the data tables in the Raw and QC tabs
• Add warning popup about sonde size not matching config set when opening ACS netCDF files
• Add clearer error text when attempting to read in an Aspen output netCDF
• Add command line option to set end of drop time in Aspen-QC
• Update logos for Aspen V4
• Use GPS altitude in second altitude column in FRD output files; update column header accordingly
• Fix bug in calculating time of synthetic surface observation that led to coding lowest winds instead of surface winds in TEMPDROP
• Update mixing ratio equation to be more precise
• Assorted static code analysis fixes and improvements

• Support for ingesting netCDF ACS files
  
  • Add input option to read data from ACS format netCDFs
  • Select aircraft observation from continuous series after possible launch time corrections (if entire aircraft data set is included)
  • Use WMO sonde types for RD41 and NRD41 (in BUFR only) now that input files contain enough metadata to tell them apart
  • Add sonde model metadata to netcdf and csv output as well
  • Remove times from input file that are not monotonically increasing, rather than rejecting the entire file
• Turn off XY graph autoscale for wind direction by default
• Fix bug in calculating MB110 group for upsondes
• Fix bug where launch PTH didn’t get correctly removed when ignored if there was no aircraft geopotential altitude
• Fix bug where overriding and then clearing launch altitude would result in an altitude of -999 if original launch altitude was missing
• Miscellaneous compilation warning fixes and code cleanup