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v0.5.0 (Major API update)

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@leewujung leewujung released this 17 May 21:42
66fca2b

Overview

This release includes:

  • major API updates to provide a more coherent data access pattern
  • restructuring of subpackages and classes to allow better maintenance and future expansion
  • reorganization of documentation, which also documents the API changes
  • overhaul and improvements of CI, including removing the use of Git LFS to store test data
  • new features
  • bug fixes

API updates

The existing API for converting files from raw instrument formats to a standardized format, and for calibrating data and performing operations such as binned averages and noise removal has been updated.

The new API uses a new EchoData object to encapsulate all data and metadata related to/parsed from a raw instrument data file. Beyond the calibration of backscatter quantities, other processing functions follow a consistent form to take an xarray Dataset as input argument and returns another xarray Dataset as output.

The major changes include:

  • change from an object-oriented method calls to functional calls for file conversion (using the new convert subpackage), and deprecate the previous Convert class for handling file parsing and conversion
  • deprecate the previous Process class, which use object-oriented method calls for performing both calibration and data processing
  • separate out calibration functions to a new calibrate subpackage
  • separate out noise removal and data reduction functions to a new preprocess subpackage
  • create a new EchoData object class that encapsulates all raw data and metadata from instrument data files, regardless of whether the data is being parsed directly from the raw binary instrument files (returned by the new function open_raw) or being read from an already converted file (returned by the new function open_converted)

See documentation for detailed usage of the new API.

Subpackage and class restructuring

The subpackages and classes were restructured to improve modularity that will help will future expansion and maintenance. The major restructuring includes:
("SONAR" below is used to indicate the sonar model, such as EK60, EK80 or AZFP)

  • consolidate overlapping EK60/EK80 components, deprecate the previous Convert classes that handled file parsing and serialization, and revise new ParseSONAR and SetGroupsSONAR classes for file parsing and serialization
  • consolidate all calibration-related components to a new calibrate submodule, which uses CalibrateSONAR classes under the hood
  • consolidate all preprocessing functions into a a new preprocess submodule, which will be later expanded to include other functions with similar use in a workflow

CI overhaul and improvements

  • Added github workflows for testing, building test docker images, and publishing directly to PyPI
  • Deprecated usage of Travis CI
  • Test run is now selective on Github, to run tests only on changed/added files. Or run all locally with run-test.py script. (#280, #302)

Documentation reorganization and updates

  • Re-organization of pages with better grouping
  • Added What's New page
  • Added Contributing to echopype page
  • Overhaul API reference page

New features

  • Add interfacing capability to read from and write to cloud object storage directly. (#216, #240)
  • Add support to convert .ad2cp files generated by Nortek's Signature series ADCP (#326)
  • Allow environmental and calibration parameters to be optionally used in calibration in place of the values stored in data file
  • Mean volume backscattering strength (MVBS) can now be computed based on actual time interval (specified in seconds) and range (specified in meters) (#54)
  • Add NMEA message type as a data variable in the Platform group (#232), which allows users to freely select the suitable ones depending on use

Bug fixes

  • Fix EK80 config XML parsing problem for files containing either PulseDuration or PulseLength (#305)
  • Fix time encoding discrepancy in AZFP conversion (#328)
  • Fix problematic automatic encoding of AZFP frequency (previously as int) to float64 (#309)
  • Overhaul EK80 pulse compressed calibration (current implementation remaining in beta, see #308)