Improve the observation preparation functions for North America SDA experiments.

[DongchenZ]

Description

Motivation and Context

Review Time Estimate

• Immediately
• Within one week
• When possible

Types of changes

• Bug fix (non-breaking change which fixes an issue)
• New feature (non-breaking change which adds functionality)
• Breaking change (fix or feature that would cause existing functionality to change)

Checklist:

• My change requires a change to the documentation.
• My name is in the list of CITATION.cff
• I agree that PEcAn Project may distribute my contribution under any or all of
  • the same license as the existing code,
  • and/or the BSD 3-clause license.
• I have updated the CHANGELOG.md.
• I have updated the documentation accordingly.
• I have read the CONTRIBUTING document.
• I have added tests to cover my changes.
• All new and existing tests passed.

[mdietze]

The new version seems to require that the system is run interactively. Would there be value in retaining the ability to load authentication from the netrc file? Or could there be instructions on how to run the function prior to execution to set the environment variables? What if the execution is remote (e.g., in the cloud or on a HPC node) where there are different environment variables? Is there a security issue with having passwords stored unencrypted as part of the environment variables? Curious what @robkooper thinks.