v1.2.x series (current stable)

v1.2.0 (10th June 2026)

This release includes major changes to the aerosol data format. We introduce a new, carefully specified data format, named Aer-Core v2. The previous format is retroactively named Aer v1. Aer-Core v2 supports varying the angular sampling grid of the phase matrix coefficients (i.e. moving the cos θ grid points) as a function of the spectral coordinate, and stores phase matrix Legendre coefficients, required for an upcoming DISORT backend. As the name suggests, Aer-Core v2 can be extended to support additional dimensions suitable for cloud simulation in the future.

In practice, these changes should be mostly transparent to end-users: all the existing data was converted from the Aer v1 format to Aer-Core v2, and the asset manager automatically downloads the updated data resources. The previous data are still available, which means that previous Eradiate versions will continue to work as before. Data converters have been added in addition to the libRadtran data format reader, offering an easy way to upgrade existing data. The only potentially breaking change is the deprecation of ParticleLayer’s dataset parameter in favour of the new particle_properties parameter.

Experimental upgrades to our Monte Carlo sampling method are also included in this release. We do not recommend yet to switch to the new eovolpath integrator: once finalized, it will become the default and the switch will be automatic for end-users.

Changed

Fixed

  • Improved error messages when initializing a MolecularAtmosphere with an incorrect value for the absorption_data parameter (PR566).

  • SolarIrradianceSpectrum now accepts various datetime-like objects for its datetime argument (PR572).

  • Restored variance computation for all stokes components (PR571).

  • Fix cache_by_id() to avoid updating state when evaluation raises (PR574).

  • Fix a bug where unstack_mdistant_grid() would not work with 1D arrays (PR574).

  • Fix incorrect error message in is_positive() validator (PR574).

  • 🖥️ The osx-arm64 dev environments now use Conda binaries for the netcdf-4 library (PR574).

Added

  • ⚠️ Added EOVolPathIntegrator that implements the DDIS variance reduction technique from Buras and Mayer [2011] (PR565). This feature is experimental.

  • ⚠️ Added the extremum_resolution parameter to AbstractHeterogeneousAtmosphere, which introduces local extremum structures to Eradiate, improving performance for spherical shell atmosphere and future 3D volumes (PR568). This feature is experimental.

  • ⚠️ Added residual ratio tracking transmittance estimator, accessible through the use_rrt parameter in the Atmosphere interface (PR569). This feature is experimental.

  • Added the ParticleProperties class to provide aerosol data lookup and interpolation (PR575).

  • Added aerosol data conversion functions in the eradiate.data.convert module (PR575).