ARSCL (Active Remote Sensing of CLouds) Updates and Radar Consolidation

Description

The ARSCL family of Value-added Products (VAPs) is one of the ARM's most downloaded products. This chain and family of VAPs has included multiple variations over the years, such as the original ARSCL that was applied to MMCR radar data, KAZRCOR corrected KAZR radar moments, a KAZR variant of ARSCL (KAZRARSCL), and a stand-alone WACR version (WACRARSCL). It is however important that this product chain continues to improve, while also consolidating and simplifying products wherever possible (i.e., removing excessively long names or redundant streams), in order to provide the best cloud location and characterization for ARM users. Over the last few years, several additional and more informative sources of cloud properties have been added to ARM's Archive that could be folded into ARSCL. Similarly, recent years have found the ARM infrastructure and its PIs increasingly adopting Python as a programming language of choice, as well as the open source paradigm, where appropriate. As a result of these new data sources and updated software engineering practices, the time has come for a unification for several of these KAZRCOR, KAZR-ARSCL and WACR-ARSCL upgrades under the larger “ARSCL” banner. Accordingly, a series of changes will be made that take full advantage of new ARM Program capabilities and advances in software engineering practices, which include conversion to Python code, acceptance for more data sources as input, improve computational efficiency, open-source appropriate portions, and more transparency for ARM ARSCL users.