With file formats, naming conventions, and aging platforms, working with weather radar data has been a notoriously difficult endeavor until recently. Tools for plotting and analyzing radar data have existed generally at an institutional or proprietary level. Community tools, such as Solo II/3, have been indispensible. However, they do not necessarily take advantage of modern computing technologies and address the shift of academic and government institutions to open source platforms for cost savings, performance, and development flexibility. Great strides have been made in this area recently and momentum continues to grow to develop the next generation of software for weather radar data analysis. This presentation introduces ongoing work on the ARM Radar Toolkit Viewer (ARTView).
Following the acquisition of six weather radars near 2009, the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility, needed a way to work with the data collected by these instruments. The inability to process these data with “off-the-shelf” tools led to the development of the Python – ARM Radar Toolkit (Py-ART). This software package continues to grow and develop with both dedicated developers and community involvement. ARTView takes advantage of this quickly developing package that is able to read a large majority of file types and put them in a standard data structure. ARTView began as a relatively simple graphical user interface (GUI) display that allowed a user to browse through volumes of weather radar data with simple keyboard and mouse navigation. Functionality continues to be developed, for both viewing and interacting with data. ARTView is designed to make access to Py-ART methods easy, while providing an environment that promotes user-contributed “Plugins” to advance functionality. The desired result is quick data exploration without the need to develop lengthy analysis scripts and a scalable interface for future growth. ~