brawl4d

Interactive four-dimensional (space and time) data browsing using the stormdrain data processing pipeline. When data are loaded, they are pushed downstream to plot outlets, stdout, etc. Along the way, data may be transformed, filtered, cached, and branched off to other analysis tasks, including other plots beside the main viewer. There is also animation support.

Interactivity is provided graphically by interaction with plots in matplotlib, and via the command line using the IPython notebook, of which there are several examples in brawl4d/notebooks. As the IPython notebook gains browser-based GUI capabilities, it should be possible to replace code cells that trigger, for instance, animation, with buttons and other standard UI conventions.

The motivation for this code was to provide an interactive data viewer for data from VHF Lightning Mapping Arrays that was built on open tools. Its dependencies are easily satisfied by any of the usual scientific Python distributions, thereby easing setup for research groups. It also facilitates sharing of interactive views of the data between research groups by passing notebooks back and forth. A narrative example demonstrating how to download field campaign data in zoom to an interesting point is provided in the in the DC3 notebook.

It should be trivially easy to add any dataset that is represented as a numpy structured/named array (see the demo dataset in brawl4d.py). Times are treated as seconds since a reference date, which is stored as the basedate attribute of the Panels4D object. Adding radar data viewing capability, probably through pyart, is a high priority.

Requirements

• Python
• IPython
• numpy and matplotlib
• stormdrain (github.com/deeplycloudy/stormdrain)
• For LMA support
  • lmatools (bitbucket.org/deeplycloudy/lmatools)
  • pytables (for HDF5 LMA data files)

Install

Clone and add to your path. Adding a proper setup.py is a TODO.

What's with the name?

Balloon, Radar, and Aircraft, With Lightning in Four Dimensions.