Progress update on NCAR radar/remote sensing software

The Remote Sensing Facility at NCAR/EOL has begun a process that will lead to the re-tooling of software for radar data perusal, editing and analysis of measurements from single and multiple radars, both ground-based and airborne. Two important aspects of this upgrade will be 1) adoption of a single format for ingest of radar data sets and 2) creation of a central repository for this suite of software packages. We will continue to seek input during the process, either through workshops, town hall meetings, or on-line forums so that the development of these software tools is responsive to the needs of the user community. This work follows a town hall meeting held four years ago at the 32nd Conference on Radar Meteorology. We hope to hold a similar town hall meeting at this radar conference to update the user community on progress, to answer their questions, and to seek community input.

NCAR/EOL supports software that 1) is directly required to perform quality assurance evaluation on data from EOL platforms and 2) software for decision support during NSF-funded field studies. When possible, EOL also makes these software packages available to the broader research community. In the past, radar software supported by EOL included the SOLO radar data editor, the accompanying translator software ("xltrs"), the Zebra analysis package, and REORDER (a gridding package). Additional software that was developed and supported by NCAR's Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology (MMM) Division included CEDRIC and SPRINT. This combination of software programs represents a complete suite for the editing, gridding, analysis, and synthesis of remotely sensed measurements, along with other in-situ atmospheric data sets.

Priorities within NCAR and EOL changed over the last few years, resulting in reduced support for much of the listed software, and caused some software to become frozen, retired, or orphaned. During this same period UCAR's Unidata group created IDV, a package designed and used mainly for the analysis of larger-scale data sets such as those from U.S. national networks of radars and satellites. Additionally, NCAR's Research Applications Laboratory developed the Titan/CIDD package that is used mostly for display of radar datasets with some analysis capabilities. There are also commercial software such as MATLAB and IDL that has gained in popularity to edit and analyze radar data.

An integral part of EOL's on-going efforts includes a careful evaluation of the software listed in the previous paragraph to determine its effectiveness in the full range of analysis requirements for radar data.

The extended abstract will provide details, and results to date.