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

With the acquisition of a number of X- and C-band scanning precipitation radars, the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) climate facility now routinely deals with large amounts of complex data from these instruments. The measured parameters from these radars as well as value-added products (VAPs) derived from these data are made available to the 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 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/.