Mars Dust Activity Database

Version 1.1 of the Mars Dust Activity Database (MDAD, v1.1) includes storm boundaries for every instance from the Mars Color Imager (MARCI) era of Version 1.0 of the MDAD (Mars Years 28–32).  The dataset is organized into five tar files, one for each Mars year.  Two formats are provided in every tar file and provide equivalent data.  A netcdf file (*.nc) contains a mask of the dust events on each sol of the Mars Year (soy) in an array called "MDAD," along with a string vector of the name of the sol from the Mars Daily Global Map (MDGM) database in a variable called "dayList," and an array of values in a variable called "timeList" of the time of the sol containing:  start soy, end soy, mean soy, median soy, start areocentric longitude (Ls), end Ls, mean Ls, median Ls. The MDAD mask has dimensions time x longitude (3600 points) x latitude (1801 points).  The length of the time dimension varies across years:  MY 28 (340), MY 29 (551), MY 30 (616), MY 31 (623), MY 32 (358).  The dayList and timeList variables have the same time dimension length as the MDAD masks.  The mask variable is in uint8 (unsigned byte) format and may be converted directly to unsigned int upon reading.  Values of (255) indicate missing pixels of the MDGM.  A value of (0) indicates no dust instances.  Values ranging 1–133 are the number portion of the member ID to connect the mask back to MDAD v1.0.  Values ranging 134–250 are splitting members with the member ID of (mask value - 133)b. 

Each Mars-year bundle also contains a folder of *.csv files, each of which corresponds to a single dust storm instance on a single sol.  The csv files are named with the following convention:  SUB_dayXX_MEM_ZZZb.csv, where “SUB” is the MARCI mission subphase and XX is the sol number ranging 01–34.  The last seven characters are the member ID for the storm from MDAD v1.0, with ZZZ ranging 001–133 and "MEM" the subphase on which the member starts.  For storms that have merged, only the member ID with the smallest ZZZ is included in the file name, and the character "b" is only included in the file name for splitting storms.  Each *.csv file consists of a two column matrix.  Column 1 is east longitude, and column 2 is latitude.  Each longitude, latitude point is a pixel on the boundary of the storm instance.  The boundaries have a resolution of 1/10°, so each row of the matrix maps to a unique pixel of a MDGM.  The total set of longitude, latitude points is the outline of the dust instance, which traces the outside of the storm masks provided in the *.nc files.

An additional comma separated value file with the name SUB.list provides a copy of the "timeList" array included in the *.nc files.  For each subphase of MDGMs, there is a single *.list, and each row is a single day with the following information in csv format: subphase_day, start MY, end MY, start sol-of-year (soy), end soy, mean soy, median soy, start areocentric longitude (Ls), end Ls, mean Ls, median Ls.  Additionally, a folder entitled "list" contains an additional *.list comma separated value file for each day of the subphase, where each row describes a single swath in that sol's MDGM.  It has the following format: Swath name, Earth time collected, MY, Mars month, soy, Ls, center west longitude.