xradar: Shared IO in the Open Radar Stack

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has adopted a new single global weather radar data standard data representation that is CF/NetCDF based, FM301, which will be used moving forward for sweep and volume data. This new data standard moves to a hierarchical tree-based data structure, utilizing the CfRadial2 data format. The Open Radar Science Community has developed a new radar package, Xradar, which uses this new data standard as a key point of collaboration. Xradar offers an in-memory representation of the FM301/Cadial2 hierarchical data structure. Over the past year, progress was made on porting and adapting existing readers from wradlib to Xradar, with the next steps being to integrate with other existing toolkits such as the Python ARM Radar Toolkit (Py-ART) package. Users will be able to read a variety of data formats, apply their analysis, visualize their dataset, and output to the FM301/Cadial2 data standard.

The plan moving forward is for Xradar to be the primary input/output (IO) tool which was previously implemented in each radar package (Py-ART, wradlib, etc). Once users read in their data using Xradar, they can use accessors, which are connections to other toolkits of the xarray-based scientific Python stack. For example, we plan on implementing a Py-ART accessor, which will enable users to use the full suite of functionality in Py-ART. This enables direct cross-compatibility between libraries, allowing open radar community users to use features in wradlib, without needing to save the file to disk re-read using wradlib. One common ARM data correction task in wradlib, that would be helpful to use within Py-ART, is beam blockage corrections. Xradar reduces the need for duplicated readers, saving files to disk, ultimately reducing the time-to-science. As a single point of IO Xradar will also lessen the burden of maintenance in the different Open Radar Science Packages. Bindings to other programming languages, e,g, C/C++, may also be explored. We will provide updates related to progress on this new tool, highlighting the newest member of the Open Radar Science community.