UNILIB - Magnetic Field Library

The UNILIB library has been designed as a tool for the TREND project (Trapped Radiation ENvironment Development, ESA contracts 11711/95/NL/JG and 17025/94/NL/JG) by the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy for The European Space Agency.

The library provides tools to evaluate new coordinates magnetic field coordinates, which are related to interactions of particles with the environment, such as the atmospheric material encountered or the energy loss experienced by the trapped particles. The software library therefore implements tools to compute the geomagnetic field, to trace magnetic field lines and drift shells, to determine minimum mirror point altitudes and to evaluate averaged quantities along a drift trajectory.

The modules of the library have been written conform to Standard FORTRAN 77, extended to the use of STRUCTURE and RECORD statements, later replaced by FORTRAN 90 TYPE declarations. While most of the code uses a fixed-format FORTRAN 77 syntax, the use of FORTRAN 90 TYPE requires a FORTRAN 90 compiler, which is ubiquitous even on older architectures.

Machine specific code has been avoided so that the library can be ported on a broad variety of platforms, under different operating systems.