Authors: Scott Collis, Joe VanAndel, Jonathan Helmus, Mike Dixon

Active remote sensors collect complex data sets, which, traditionally, have been further complicated by a lack of community standards. With multiple agencies investing heavily in state of the art sensor technology there is a need to create community standards that enable interoperability across various software suites. The first and easiest approach is a unified file format building on existing community standards. This presentation outlines efforts on the Lidar/Radar Open Source Environment (LROSE) at NCAR and the ARM efforts on the Python ARM Radar Toolkit (Py-ART) two toolkits, which approach the problem of working with active sensors from two different directions. LROSE is a community software project is to provide to the scientific community with a modern, fully-featured software suite for handling radar, profiler and lidar data. While Py‑ART uses an abstract python object to allow new modules to be build easily without in-depth knowledge of the data source or internal representation of the data. Current progress will be reported as well as efforts to unify the projects in order to enable end users, not possessing high end programming skills, ease of access to the data.