Digging Through NetCDF4 Data Using Google Gemini AI

I wanted to take a look at the ionosphere over North America late last week, and that meant I needed to explore ionospheric readings via radio occultation from the satellite constelations launched by Spire and PlanetIQ.

Spoiler: I haven't been able to get ionospheric data from either constellation yet, but that's a data publishing issue, not a data file structure issue.

Exploring the availabel data was a bit clunky at first to say the least. Then, it occurred to me that I could probably ask an AI to write Python code to pull out the strucutre of each netCDF file somewhat automatically. Sure enough, the Google Gemini search enginee version gave me an immediate answer

I modified the code just a bit per my personal taste. The complete code can be seen here.

From there, with only the filename, I could get output like

Where to get the data

I was having the best luck with PlanetIQ data as published by UCAR at

https://data.cosmic.ucar.edu/gnss-ro/planetiq/noaa/nrt/level2/2024/

However, ionospheric data files cut off on the 18th day of the year, and haven't turned back on. I'm asking about where the data is, but I haven't found it yet.

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