EMERALD: An Open Source Tool for Manipulating and Displaying Radar and Lidar data in MATLAB

There is a wide variety of RADAR and LIDAR data formats and an even wider variety of analysis software available, but often with poor interconnectivity. A useful software package may only be able to read a few particular data formats, requiring the user to convert their data into one of those formats. The LIDAR RADAR Open Software Environment (LROSE) is an NSF-funded project to develop a common, open source suite of software for the RADAR and LIDAR community based on a common data format CFRadial (UNIDATA NetCDF with conventions based on the Climate and Forecasting conventions). In this paper, we introduce one of the free and open source display tools under active development at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR): thE Matlab Environment for Radar And Lidar Data (EMERALD). EMERALD is both a graphical user interface (GUI) and an advanced programming interface (API) for loading, manipulating, and displaying RADAR and LIDAR data (CFRadial format) within MATLAB. EMERALD is designed to be easy to use for beginning users, but highly extensible by allowing users to script algorithms in MATLAB.