Quick Guide: Checksit compliance checking tool
What is the “checksit” tool?
The checksit tool is designed to help instrument scientists to ensure that their files comply with the NCAS data standard. It is an open source tool (available here) that compares a NetCDF or image file to the relevant data standard vocabularies.
Written as a generic tool for building compliance checking, checksit has other users too, not detailed in this article, but include checking against other standards and 'buddy checking' a file against a known 'good' file for quick comparisons.
When to Use it
When an instrument scientist has prepared a NetCDF or image file for archiving at CEDA following one of the NCAS data standards, they can use checksit to make sure the it complies with the standard they are following. It provides the instrument scientist with a list of error or warning messages that they can then use to diagnose where their NetCDF or image files deviate from the standard.
At present it covers the NCAS General, NCAS Image and NCAS Radar data standards, as well as other standards as added in by other users for other purposes.
How to use it
The checksit tool can be run directly on the JASMIN data analysis system or downloaded and used locally.
It can also be downloaded from GitHub here: https://github.com/cedadev/checksit
Guidance on how to use it is available here: https://checksit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Example of using the tool on JASMIN
checksit will automatically determine if NCAS data standards are being used in a file and apply the appropriate standards checks to apply:
/apps/jasmin/community/checksit/checksit check /badc/ncas-mobile/data/ncas-radiosonde-1/20230401_woest/v1.1/2023/06/19/ncas-radiosonde-1_ash-farm_20230619-055943_sonde_woest_v1.1.nc
Further Details
For full details on the Checksit tool, including how to download and install it see: https://checksit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Alternatively, for use on JASMIN see: https://help.jasmin.ac.uk/docs/software-on-jasmin/community-software-checksit/