Development of a Display Tool to Quality Control Weather Balloon Data for Space Launch Vehicles Using Python

Continuous atmospheric data analysis is an important factor for space launch vehicle design and operations. The balloon quality control tool was developed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) Natural Environments Branch (NEB) for monitoring quality control processes and verifying the automated flags created on the balloon data sets analyzed. The data sets currently analyzed are comprised of high-resolution and low-resolution balloon data from NASA Kennedy Space Center (KSC), co-located on the United States Air Force’s Eastern range (ER) at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The NEB was tasked to perform a quality assessment of these data sets and needed a tool to confirm the quality control (QC) flags produced from an automated process and add additional QC flags if necessary. This Graphical User Interface (GUI) was developed to visualize all of the data from these balloon sets, display any flags from the automated QC process, and add additional flags to variables if necessary. The GUI was developed in Python 3.6 utilizing different packages available such as pandas for data analysis and manipulation, NumPy for high-performance multidimensional array and tools to compute with and manipulate arrays, Matplotlib for plotting data and Tkinter to build the GUI.