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Assess usability of existing SMP force vs depth data #123

@aaarendt

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@aaarendt

I'm working on adapting the microstructure tutorial to the new db. From the NSIDC smp user guide I understand that the csv we imported to the db contains a subset of all data measured by the sensor, and that the raw full profile is in the binary .pnt file.

I'm questioning the overall usefulness of only posting the force vs depth data. It is fine for a quick look, but even for basic operations one has to filter parts of the force profile that are above ground. As shown in the tutorial, this is accomplished via the snowmicropyn Python library which operates on the raw .pnt data.

From what I can tell, someone ran the export_samples function within snowmicropyn's profile.py, generated a CSV which was then uploaded to NSIDC.

Now I'm seeing that function has a param snowpack_only. Do we know if snowpack_only = True? The NSIDC docs don't seem to indicate that.

Larger question is, if someone wants to get SSA from the SMP data they need density, which is still in the pnt file. Is our recommended approach to go back to NSIDC and acquire the raw pnt data for these operations?

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