A flux station measures the heat, water, and carbon that land and atmosphere exchange. Traditionally it reports one wind-averaged number for everything upwind. FluxMapper™ resolves that number into FluxMaps™: field-scale maps that show which parcels and practices produced the exchange. This month we're opening two new doors to those maps. One is for exploring, and one is for analysis.
FluxMapper Studio: explore FluxMaps, no install needed
FluxMapper Studio is our free, browser-based way to explore FluxMaps. It replaces the FluxMapper On-Demand beta many of you tried last year, and it runs on the public US NSF NEON tower network.
Each day of FluxMaps has 48 half-hourly map layers, and every pixel is a flux time series with its uncertainty. What's new in Studio:
- Geofencing with dynamic aggregation plots. Draw an area of interest on the map, and the aggregated time series and diurnal cycles update as you draw. You can download the aggregated time series data for your own analysis.
- Quality filtering with built-in QA layers. Apply FluxMapper's quality layers to see and keep only the estimates that pass QA.
- An improved download button that makes it easier to take the data with you.
Studio uses public NEON data only. To map your own sites, use Flux Mapping as a Service or FluxMapper in LI-COR Cloud®.
fluxmapPy v0.6: FluxMaps meet Python
fluxmapPy is our new open-source Python package for working with FluxMaps in your own analysis. It's MIT-licensed and led by AtmoFacts Research Scientist Allen Kaplan. Four high-level functions cover the everyday workflow:
- Open FluxMap layers.
- Apply quality flags.
- Clip to your area of interest: a polygon, or a radius around the tower.
- Compute summary statistics, such as half-hourly and daily time series and diurnal cycles.
A step-by-step Jupyter tutorial walks through a real research question on public NEON FluxMaps. You can open it in Google Colab and run it without installing anything locally.
v0.6 is an early release: you install it from GitHub, and function names may still change on the way to v1.0. We'd rather ship early and learn with you, so please tell us what's missing through the issue templates on GitHub.
Why open tools, why now
Flux science is becoming a layered system: tower measurements feed spatial reconstructions, machine learning, and global inference. The upper layers are only as trustworthy as the observations underneath them. Communities like FLUXNET and AmeriFlux have long built shared, open processing tools for exactly this reason.
Studio and fluxmapPy are our contribution at the scale where land is managed. Together they make land-atmosphere exchange visible, attributable, and actionable there, in the open, so anyone can check the work.
Looking ahead
Next for fluxmapPy are a Python Package Index (PyPI) release, conda-forge packaging, and a citable DOI for each release on the way to v1.0. Studio will keep growing with new datasets and views.
Thank you to everyone who tested the On-Demand beta and sent feedback. Studio and fluxmapPy are better for it. Try them, break them, and tell us what you'd like to measure next at info@atmofacts.com.