Spectroscopy -- Second Steps

4. Saving and Restoring the Fitting Parameters and Spectral Data

If you want to save your actual SPEX session, simply type:

SPEX> save_event

This command creates the files "summary.dat" and "spex_dflts.dat" in your IDL working directory. If you call SPEX again, you can continue where you left off by restoring the data with:

SPEX> restore_event, /verb

After you restore the event, you may need to type read_drm in order to get the correct RSM.

SPEX allows you to export all the resulting parameters to an IDL save file, so that you can do any further analysis you are interested in outside of SPEX but within the IDL environment. An easy way to accomplish this is to call:

SPEX> idl, spex_save_data, /all, 'spex07202_bpowfit_spectra.sav'

Whenever we type idl, we use the command out of SPEX. The detail of SPEX commands can be found at "Analyzing Flare X-ray Spectra Using SPEX".

Using the spex_save_data command, a file named "spex0723_bpowfit_spectra.sav" will be saved in our IDL working directory. It contains all the spectral data and fitting parameters we need for later use. We can get the detailed explanation of all saved variables from Richard Schwartz's help_spex.txt. Here I explain some of them for later use:

SPEX Parameters
APAR_ARR	FLOAT Array(6, 37)	Model best-fit parameters for each interval.
APAR_SIGMA	FLOAT = Array(6, 37)	Curvefit uncertainties on the best fit parameters in APAR_ARR.
CHI	FLOAT = Array(1, 37)	Reduced chi square for each accumulation interval.
XSELECT	DOUBLE = Array(2, 37)	Time boundaries on accumulation intervals referenced to the same base UT.
UTBASE	DOUBLE = 7.4338560e+008	The UT base.
EDGES	FLOAT = Array(2, 82)	Detector energy channel edges.
OBSI	FLOAT = Array(82, 37)	Count flux in accumulation interval I.
EOBSI	FLOAT = Array(82, 37)	Uncertainties on OBSI.
BACKI	FLOAT = Array(82, 37)	Background for accumulation interval.
CONVI	FLOAT = Array(82, 37)	Factor for conversion from count spectrum to photon spectrum.