Australian National Radar Archive in the Cloud - Applications for Research and Industry

Radar datasets are a fundamental observational tool, but their significant size and varying standards presents an ongoing challenge for the international community. For the Australian Bureau of Meteorology radar network, the recovery of long-term datasets if often an expensive and time consuming task, and remains in a data standard that is difficult to interpret. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents a simple, cloud based solution for hosting the Australian radar archive using modern data standard, drawing upon the successful approaches for the NEXRAD dataset. The architecture of the historical and real-time cloud services are discussed. Examples of research and classroom applications are shown through the integration of storage service libraries with existing radar toolkits (e.g., Py-ART), allowing for rapid accessibility and analysis. Furthermore, the benefits of this dataset and the hosting platform are explored across a range of industry sectors. This includes streamlined R&D of nowcasting services for the energy distribution control rooms through integration of cloud-based asset data, and the rapid generation of long-term climatological products for the insurance hazard modelling and asset management.