The Python-ARM Radar Toolkit (Py-ART), an open source package for weather radar.

Jonathan Helmus1, Scott Collis1, Karen Johnson2, Kirk North3, Scott Giangrande2, and Michael Jensen2.
1EnvironmentalScience Division, Argonne National Laboratory
2Environmental Sciences Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory
3Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, McGill University
Argonne National Laboratory is a U.S. Department of
Energy laboratory managed by U Chicago Argonne, LLC.

Abstract Plotting Antenna coordinate moment corrections

With the acquisition of a number of X- and C-band scanning precipitation radars, the Py-ART can quickly create high quality plots of radar moments. Support for creating plan Py-ART includes implementations of many algorithms which can be used to correct and analyze radar
Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) climate facility now routinely deals with large position indicator (PPI) and range-height indicator (RHI) plots as well as plotting individual moments in antenna coordinates.
amounts of complex data from these instruments. The measured parameters from these radars rays is included. More elaborate plots can be created using the functionality provided by Py-
as well as value-added products (VAPs) derived from these data are made available to the ART and the matplotlib plotting package. Z-PHI based attenuation correction
radar, cloud and climate modeling communities. Preparing these data for dissemination requires
extensive use of computational resources and algorithms, which are not well addressed by PPI
current software packages. To address these needs we have developed the Python-ARM
Radar Toolkit (Py-ART), an open source package for working with weather radar data.

Py-ART offers a powerful interpreted environment for ingesting radar data from a number of
formats, correcting for aliasing and attenuation, mapping radar coordinate data from a single or
multiple radars to a Cartesian grid, and performing a number of geophysical retrievals on the
data. The package is capable of creating Climate and Forecast (CF) standard NetCDF files as
well as files in 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, and matplotlib, available to the language, as well as interfacing with legacy C and
FORTRAN radar code. The package is available freely under a BSD license and can be
downloaded from https://github.com/ARM-DOE/pyart/.

Ingest and Writing RHI

Py-ART has the ability to natively ingest (read) radar data from MDV, Sigmet, NEXRAD Phase correction using an linear programming (LP) algorithm
Level 2, and CF/Radial, as well as other NetCDF based formats. Using a Cython interface,
file formats supported by the NASA TRMM Radar Software Library (UF, Lassen) can also
be ingested and used by Py-ART. Field data and instrument metadata are stored in
memory as a Radar object with which the routines in Py-ART can interact. Data can be
written out to Climate and Forecast (CF) standard NetCDF files which conform to the the
CF/Radial standard.

Format Native Py-ART Ingest RSL Ingest

CF/Radial X (and writing)
MDV X
Sigmet X X Univ. Washington 4D Velocity Dealiasing
UF X
NEXRAD (WSR-88D) Level II Level II
Lassen X

Mapping and Gridding

Radar data is collected in antenna coordinates (similar to radial coordinates). For many Additional information and Acknowledgements
purposes, it is useful to map these data to a Cartesian grid. Py-ART includes routines to
perform this gridding on moments from one or multiple radars using a nearest neighbor
Py-ART is an open source project which is distributed under a BSD license. The source code
distance-weighted interpolation which utilizes a KD-Tree or Ball Tree for efficient nearest is hosted at GitHub. We welcome forks, contributions, bug-reports and suggestions. For
neighbor lookups. The resulting gridded data and metadata is stored in a Grid object. additional information or questions about the package, please contact the lead developer,
Jonathan Helmus ([email protected]).

https://github.com/ARM-DOE/pyart

Documentation and examples are available online at: http://arm-doe.github.io/pyart

Thanks go to the following for providing algorithms, code and support:

Alexander Ryzhkov, Matthias Steiner, Bart Kelley, Eric Bruning… and many others!

Py-ART would not be possible without the hard work of many other open source Scientific
Python packages such as NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, Cython, and python-netcdf4. This poster has been created by UChicago Argonne, LLC, Operator of Argonne
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF National Laboratory (“Argonne”). Argonne, a U.S. Department of Energy Office
of Science laboratory, is operated under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.

ENERGY This research was supported by the Office of Biological and Environmental
Research of the U.S. Department of Energy as part of the Atmospheric Radiation
Measurement Climate Research Facility.