Kenneth Aikin

Senior Associate Scientist

Tropospheric Chemistry

NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory
325 Broadway, R/CSL7
Boulder, CO 80305 USA

303-351-2648
Kenneth.C.Aikin@noaa.gov

Affiliation

CIRES

Ken is a senior associate scientist with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and an affiliate with the NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory (CSL). He is the data manager for the Tropospheric Chemistry Group, where he maintains the group’s data archive and a website which provides access to that data in addition to information about the many Tropospheric Chemistry field missions.

In addition, Ken provides user-friendly data analysis tools for scientists, particularly using the Igor Pro software environment. Some specific Igor-based projects include:

  • flight-planning software
  • GIS tools, creation of maps and projections of data
  • generation of KML code for visualizing data in Google Earth
  • library of general-purpose routines used by many collaborators
  • library of routines for creating and reading ICARTT formatted files
  • peak correlation tool to align data
  • multiple linear regression project for performing meteorological normalization
  • collaborator in the software project TERN, a highly automated, chromatographic peak area integration program
  • many other tools for data reformatting and manipulation

Ken has also worked on real-time data visualization. For the CSL mobile lab, he wrote data-acquisition software to collect data from various instruments and display graphs of this data for operators during drives.

For aircraft projects, Ken has written highly customizable software to provide the on-board flight scientist with data displays from a variety of networked instruments and aircraft sensors. In addition, he has written software that sends data to ground-based servers for real-time display on interactive websites during flights. This allows scientists on the ground to view data as it is collected on the aircraft.

Education

B.S. in physics from Lewis and Clark College, 1986

Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

last modified: November 24, 2020

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