The International Radiation Belt Environment Modeling (IRBEM) library is freely distributed under the umbrella of the PRBEM COSPAR panel.
In 2003 ONERA-DESP (space environment department) decided to put together a set of source codes into a library dedicated to radiation belt modeling. The toolkit was then called ONERA-DESP-LIB. Because the project has grown along time, and because its development is nowadays more like an international collaborative effort, it has been decided in 2008, after COSPAR 2008 Montreal assembly, to move the library name to IRBEM-LIB (which refers to COSPAR PRBEM panel) and to distribute it under COSPAR PRBEM umbrella (a neutral body).
The IRBEM Fortran library allows to compute magnetic coordinates and drift shells using various external magnetic field models. Further routines are provided for various coordinate and time format transformations.
The library can be called from FORTRAN or C code and from IDL, Python or MATLAB code. For IDL, Python and MATLAB wrappers are provided in the distribution package.
IRBEM requires a Fortran compiler, and can be installed on most environments.
Quick build procedure on Linux and Mac OSX with gfortran:
git clone https://github.com/PRBEM/IRBEM.git
cd IRBEM
make OS=linux64 ENV=gfortran64 all
make OS=linux64 ENV=gfortran64 install
See the README.install file for more details.
The IRBEM project is an international effort, and welcomes any contribution. Please raise any issue (bug reports, usage questions, feature requests, ...) on the Issues page.
We also welcome Pull Requests (PR) for bug fixes or new features. All developments should be done on a dedicated branch and be submitted as a PR. If you are not familiar with this process, see this guide. The overall process is the following:
- First fork the project on github using the Fork button at the top of this page.
- Clone the forked repository or add it as a new remote on your local git repository.
- Create a new branch for the new development.
- Modify the code.
- Push to your forked repository.
- Submit a Pull Request on the Pull requests page
The IRBEM library is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this library. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
COSPAR does not warrant or assume any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, use, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed in documents and software available from the IRBEM library or developed as a result of the use of information or software made available from the library.
The main authors of IRBEM are Daniel Boscher and Sebastien Bourdarie (ONERA-DESP, Toulouse, France).
The authors wish to thank:
- Erwin De Donder, Hugh Evans, Reiner Friedel, Tim Guild, Daniel Heynderickx, Stu Huston, Adam Kellerman, Colby Lemon, Kyungguk Min, Steve Morley, Paul O'Brien, Christopher Roth, and Mykhaylo Shumko for general contributions to the IRBEM library.
- K. Pfitzer, N. Tsyganenko, I. Alexeev and their co-authors for providing us magnetic field model source codes and for good discussions on how to use their model correctly.
- R. Friedel (LANL), Y. Dotan and M. Redding (Aerospace Corporation) for good discussions, advices and bug reports which are always very helpfull when one attemps to develop such a tool.
- D. Bilitza for his help regarding the use of IGRF magnetic field model and MSIS models.
- D. Brautigam for providing us CRRES models.
- D. Vallado for providing free of use source code for orbit propagator (SGP4).