The Lidar Radar Open Software Environment (LROSE): Progress and Plans

Radars and lidars are critical for protecting society from high impact weather and understanding the atmosphere and biosphere, but they are complex instruments that produce copious quantities of data that pose many challenges for researchers, students, and instrument developers. The Lidar Radar Open Software Environment (LROSE) is being developed to meet these challenges and help address the 'big data' problem faced by users in the research and education communities. Through support from the National Science Foundation, the LROSE project is developing a 'Virtual Toolbox' stocked with core algorithm modules for those typical processing steps that are well understood and documented in the peer-reviewed literature. LROSE will build on existing prototypes and available software elements, while facilitating community development of new techniques and algorithms to distribute a suite of well-documented software modules for performing radar and lidar analysis. By combining the open source approach with recent developments in virtual machines and cloud computing, we are developing a system that is both highly capable and easy to run on virtually any hardware, without the complexity of a compilation environment. The suite of currently available LROSE software will be presented, along with a summary of the first user’s workshop in April 2017, and plans for the future.