A Description of the Microwave Temperature Profiler (MTP) Instrument Processing Software

The Microwave Temperature Profiler (MTP) and associated processing software were developed under a contract between the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) and the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) with funding provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The MTP has been operated on the NSF NCAR Gulfstream V (GV) aircraft since 2008, and data sets have been delivered to the community. The focus of this report is the MTP software suite written by MJ Mahoney which controls the instrument in-flight and provides data processing and display capability. The suite consists of almost a million lines of Visual Basic 6 (VB6) code that encompass algorithms for the MTP flying on a variety of platforms, with a large suite of user-selectable options and associated processing logic to enable exploration of a variety of paradigms for converting raw counts collected by the MTP into atmospheric temperature profiles. Given the complexity of the software suite, the cessation of support for VB6, and the attrition of JPL experts, software engineers and scientists at the NSF NCAR Research Aviation Facility initiated an effort to re-develop critical sections of the code in a modern programming language. The effort required a substantial reverse engineering process to understand the logic and functionality of the extensive VB6 code written at JPL. The goal of this report is to meticulously trace the logic and flow of the VB6 software and extract the specific subset of approximately 10,000 lines of code that apply to processing the MTP data as collected aboard the NSF NCAR GV and with the specific options applied to NSF NCAR field projects flown from 2008-2022.