IRBEM Library

The International Radiation Belt Environment Modeling (IRBEM) library is a set of source codes dedicated to radiation belt modeling. The library facilitates the calculation of magnetic coordinates and drift shells using various external magnetic field models. Further routines are provided for various spatial coordinate and time format transformations. The library can be called from FORTRAN or C, with IDL, Python, and MATLAB wrappers provided in the distribution package.

IRBEM was first developed and released as "ONERA-DESP-LIB" in 2003 by the DESP department (the space environment department) of the French aerospace lab, ONERA. As the project has grown through the years, its development is now an international collaborative effort. Following the 2008 COSPAR Assembly held in Montreal, it was decided to change the library's name to "IRBEM-LIB" to reflect this international collaboration, and to freely distribute the library under the umbrella of the COSPAR Panel on Radiation Belt Environment Modeling (PRBEM), a neutral scientific body.

Acknowledgments

Publication Acknowledgment

When publishing research that used IRBEM, please provide appropriate credit to the IRBEM team via acknowledgment:

We acknowledge the use of the IRBEM library (XXX), the latest version of which can be found at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6867552.

where the "XXX" is replaced by one of the following, depending on if you are using an official release library or a repository version of the library:

• Official Release: XXX = "version X.Y.Z" where X.Y.Z is the version number of the official release that was used (https://github.com/PRBEM/IRBEM/releases)

• Repository Version: XXX = "repository version YYY" where YYY is the output of git rev-parse --short HEAD

Community Contributors

The IRBEM team wishes to thank:

• Daniel Boscher, Sebastien Bourdarie, Paul O'Brien, Tim Guild, Daniel Heynderickx, Steve Morley, Adam Kellerman, Christopher Roth, Hugh Evans, Antoine Brunet, Mykhaylo Shumko, Colby Lemon, Seth Claudepierre, Thomas Nilsson, Erwin De Donder, Reiner Friedel, Stu Huston, Kyungguk Min, Alexander Drozdov, and the IRBEM contributor community 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, Y. Dotan and M. Redding for good discussions, advice and bug reports which are always very helpful when one attempts 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 the CRRES models.
• D. Vallado for providing free of use source code for the orbit propagator (SGP4).

Installation

IRBEM requires a Fortran compiler, and can be installed on modern Windows, Linux, and Mac computers.

Linux

The quick build procedure on Linux with gfortran:

    git clone https://github.com/PRBEM/IRBEM.git
    cd IRBEM
    make OS=linux64 ENV=gfortran64 all
    make OS=linux64 ENV=gfortran64 install

Mac OSX

The quick build procedure on Mac OSX with gfortran:

    git clone https://github.com/PRBEM/IRBEM.git
    cd IRBEM
    make OS=osx64 ENV=gfortran64 all
    make OS=osx64 ENV=gfortran64 install

Windows

Here is one way to build IRBEM for 64-bit Windows using the gfortran compiler.

1. Download and install MSYS2 and follow the Fortran installation steps (summarized below).

   1. Run MSYS2 MSYS terminal from the start menu and update the MSYS2 packages via pacman -Syu (pacman is its package manager).
   2. Run MSYS2 MSYS from the start menu again and update the rest of the packages using pacman -Syu.
   3. Install the Fortran compiler and other dependencies (base-devel and mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain) in the MSYS terminal using pacman -S --needed base-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain. Use the default option all.
   4. git is required for building IRBEM. If you don't have it, install it using msys2-git pacman -S git.
   5. Add the directory where gfortran.exe is located to the Windows path (a good place to look for it is C:\msys64\mingw64\bin). You can follow these instructions to add the path environmental variables.
   6. Confirm that the paths are set up correctly. Run gfortran --version command runs. Also, check that make runs (it will print "make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop.").

2. Clone and install IRBEM

    git clone https://github.com/PRBEM/IRBEM.git
    cd IRBEM
    make OS=win64 ENV=gfortran64 all
    make OS=win64 ENV=gfortran64 install

Congratulations! Now you have compiled libirbem.dll library in the root folder of IRBEM/.

See the README.install or compile/WINDOWS_INSTRUCTIONS.md files for more details.

Contributions

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

License

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.