e3doubt: An open-source toolkit for E3D experiment planning and uncertainty estimation

The EISCAT_3D incoherent scatter radar presents a groundbreaking opportunity for studying a wide variety of phenomena. One of the challenges presented by such an advanced facility is its tremendous flexibility: Given a science question and an estimate of the the associated ionospheric conditions, how does one begin to design an EISCAT_3D experiment? Here we present a set of open-source tools written primarily in R and Python for estimating uncertainties of EISCAT_3D measurements of three scalar quantities (plasma density, electron and ion temperature) and one vector quantity (ion drift) for arbitrary radar configurations and different combinations of beams. Using these tools one can assess whether a candidate EISCAT_3D experiment is likely to achieve the temporal and spatial resolution needed to study a particular phenomenon, and vary parameters such as beam width, bit length, and duty cycle to understand their effect on experimental uncertainties. As a demonstration we use these tools to assess the uncertainty of maps of F-region ionospheric convection reconstructed from EISCAT_3D ion drift measurements.