Frequently Asked Questions


CIS project, management and funding

Who manages CIS?

See management page

How is CIS funded?

CIS is freely available, open source software. See the funding page for information about how its core development was funded.


Documentation

Where can I find the documentation on CIS?

See the documentation section


Community

How do you support the community?

The CIS website has a forum where people can discuss issues, problems and successes with CIS. Datasets that are not supported ‘out of the box’, may become supported through community plug-ins. The CIS website offers a way for users to upload and distribute these plug-ins.

How can the community support you?

First of all: by using CIS! CIS is freely available open source but major development is only possible if we find funding agencies willing to pay for it. Having a large, active community is useful for this. Secondly, users can upload their own plug-ins so that others may now use it as well.

How can I stay up-to date with CIS developments?

There are two ways of keeping up-to date with CIS developments: The first is to follow our twitter feed here which will regularly announce any software updates and upcoming events; and the second is to register for an account with us here, so that you can recieve the periodic newsletters we send to registered users.

I don’t work in the atmospheric sciences. Can I still use CIS?

CIS is open source and freely available, so yes you can use it. There is nothing specific to atmospheric science in CIS and so as long as your data is geolocated by longitude and latitude and comes in HDF or NetCDF file format, we expect CIS can deal with it (you may have to write your own plug-in).


Installation problems

What to do if I have an installation problem?

First of all, make sure you have followed the installation directions correctly. Secondly, make sure all dependencies have installed properly. Finally, you can post a question on our forum and ask for help.


Plugins

What are these plug-ins good for?

The base functionality of CIS is extended through plug-ins. These are little pieces of Python code (each a separate file) that either help CIS make sense of a particular dataset or specify how to perform collocation. The following example may help: while CIS uses generic NetCDF, HDF and ASCII readers, the read data does not necessarily make 'sense' especially when the data is non CF-conform. A plug-in will help CIS decide which of the data pieces refers to longitude or CCN etc. Supported datasets are all handled through plug-ins, and users can create their own plug-ins for new datasets. Information on how to write a plug-in will appear shortly on these webpages.

What datasets are currently supported by CIS?

For a complete list, see the plugins page

What can I do if my favourite data is not supported by CIS?

First, it is possible that your dataset is not yet supported by the plug-ins of the official code, but that a community plug-in has already been released. Please see the plugins page.

Secondly, if no plug-in exists, it is relatively easy to write it yourself, provided you have a willingness to learn some Python. The existing plug-ins can serve as a starting point. See section 14 in the documentation for details)

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