Development and uses of the Python-ARM Radar Toolkit (Py-ART)

Poster PDF

Description

The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility routinely deals with large amounts of complex remote sensing data. The measured parameters from this remote sensing data as well as value-added products (VAPs) are made available to the cloud and climate modeling communities. Preparing this data for dissemination requires extensive use of computational resources and algorithms which are not well addressed by current software packages. Here we will report on our progress in the development of the Python-ARM Radar Toolkit (Py-ART) to address these needs.

Py-ART offers a powerful interpreted environment for ingesting radar data from a number of formats, correcting for aliasing and attenuation, mapping data to Cartesian grids, and performing a number of geophysical retrievals on the data. The package is also capable of writing data to Climate and Forecast (CF) standard NetCDF files as well as the emerging CF-Radial format for antenna coordinate data. Py-ART is written in the Python programming language, taking advantage of the powerful scientific libraries (NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib) available for the language as well as interfacing with legacy C and FORTRAN radar code. The package will be freely available under an open-source license. Here we will focus on our recent efforts to make the package more accessible to end users by simplifying the interface, increasing code readability, and developing high-quality documentation.