Documentation clarifications

[scottshambaugh]

Two points in the documentation that I was confused on that could be clarified:

• The latitude, longitude, and altitude inputs need to be relative to the WGS84 ellipsoid, rather than mean earth radius or some other coordinate system.
• The input flag time_independent is confusingly named. From my understanding, it enables latitude-dependent atmospheric structure and proper gravity variation with latitude. It does not seem to control time variations, despite its name. Took some digging in the source to figure that one out.

Also, I gotta say the library is great! Easy & intuitive to use, and really fast.

[greglucas]

The latitude, longitude, and altitude inputs need to be relative to the WGS84 ellipsoid, rather than mean earth radius or some other coordinate system.

Yes, that would be good to clarify! Everything needs to be in geodetic coordinates. There is an additional flag that would allow geopotential heights to be used, is that something you would like exposed an alternative option? Or the clarification would be enough for your use-case?

The input flag time_independent is confusingly named. From my understanding, it enables latitude-dependent atmospheric structure and proper gravity variation with latitude. It does not seem to control time variations, despite its name. Took some digging in the source to figure that one out.

This is the name "Time independent" in the Fortran source as the option for that legacy switch, so just pulled that over to the Python side.

Additional documentation PRs to clarify all of this would be more than welcome if anyone is looking to contribute!

[scottshambaugh]

There is an additional flag that would allow geopotential heights to be used, is that something you would like exposed an alternative option?

Yes please! I can work around it, but it's a convenient shorthand.

For the time_independent flag I think it's good to match the name in the fortran source, but a better description for the flag in the docs would be useful.