Environmental chemistry through intelligent atmospheric data analysis

Here we present a new open-source software package designed to facilitate the analysis of atmospheric data, with emphasis on data mining applications applied to single-particle mass spectrometry data from aerosol particles. The software package, Enchilada (Environmental Chemistry through Intelligent Atmospheric Data Analysis), is designed to seamlessly handle large datasets, to allow for temporal aggregation of data from many instruments, and to integrate techniques such as clustering (K-means, K-medians, and Art-2a), labeling of peaks in mass spectra, and temporal correlations of multiple datasets from multiple instrument types. The software, which continues to be developed and improved, provides users with a single package to integrate data from multiple mass spectrometer systems (ATOFMS, PALMS, SPASS, Q-AMS) as well as any time-based data stream. A detailed description of the software and examples of analysis methods that are incorporated into it are described here. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.