PAPCO (PAnel Plot COmposer) is plotting software developed by the Max-Planck-Institute. It is written using IDL subroutines and widgets. It allows users to display, simply and on one page, data from a variety of spacecraft instruments and other sources. PAPCO is modular in structure and allows the user to select existing modules or to construct custom modules for a new dataset.
Both the IDL software and the PAPCO modular code must be installed on your machine. IDL is licensed software that must be purchased and installed separately from PAPCO. PAPCO is freeware and available from the sites noted below.
One of PAPCO's strengths is its ability to quickly re-plot panels of data given new selection criteria. PAPCO does this by reading and retaining the various datasets to be plotted into memory. It stands to reason then, that when using PAPCO, one must carefully consider the computer resources that will be needed (disk storage and RAM) and then select the type of machine to handle the job.
The latest version of the TIDE PAPCO Module is tide_papco_v3.1. This version of TIDE PAPCO also needs a new module used to add orbit information to the bottom of each plot. That module is polar_orbit_v1.0.
To install the TIDE PAPCO and the Polar Orbit modules, first move or delete the polar_tide and polar_orbit directories in the papco_xx/papco_modules directory of your PAPCO site. Then download the tar files and place them in the papco_xx/papco_modules directory. If your browser is not set up to untar tared files, type in tar xvf tide_papco_v3.1.tar and tar xvf polar_orbit_v1.0.tar to add the latest TIDE and Polar Orbit modules to your PAPCO installation.
Starting with tide_papco_v3.0, the TIDE PAPCO module uses the TIDE high time resolution CDF files. The PO_H0_TID files contain spectrogram and moments data for H+, O+, and He+ for data from 03/28/96 to 09/30/96. The PO_H1_TID files contain spectrogram and moments data for Total Ions. These files are available from 12/08/96 to the present. The TIDE module also requires Polar orbit CDF files. The CDF files are available from the NSSDC via the CDAWeb or the Polar ftp site.