From Solo to HawkEdit: Interactive Processing and Display of Radar Data

Solo is a software application to interactively display and edit Doppler radar data exchange format (DORADE) data. Solo provides a polar view of data with interactive editing capabilities. Solo was developed by Dick Oye at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in the 1990s and early 2000s and subsequently reworked into Solo3. Although no longer compatible with modern operating systems, Solo can still run in a container and is part of the Lidar Radar Open Software Environment (LROSE) toolbox. The original Solo code has reached its end of life and is no longer maintained. The next generation of Solo splits the original functionality into two separate software applications: RadxConvert and HawkEdit. RadxConvert performs the navigation corrections which are necessary for radar data collected from a moving platform. Correction factors are incorporated and managed as metadata in CfRadial files. HawkEdit handles visualization and interactive editing.

HawkEdit is a merger of the LROSE visualization tool, HawkEye, with the original Solo editing functions. HawkEdit is the result of a collaboration of software developers, atmospheric scientists, and meteorologists in the academic, research, and observational areas and provides interactive editing of data as through a script editor and spreadsheet interface. HawkEdit recognizes, displays and offers interactive editing of airborne and ground-based radar and lidar data.

Solo has a unique script syntax and language to organize functions into quality control (QC) procedures. The HawkEdit script editor allows users to organize QC stages, but uses the more common Javascript language. The Solo functions to remove aircraft motion, remove surface, velocity folding and unfolding, quality control markers using bad flags, despeckle, and defreckle of the ray data are part of the HawkEdit Javascript interpreter. The Solo functions include Bargen and Brown unfolding using aircraft wind, local wind, and/or gate data as initial values. HawkEdit visualizes polar data and offers interactive boundary drawing on the polar display. Boundaries define areas to include or exclude sections of data, where the script editing functions respect user-defined boundary definitions. HawkEdit provides zoom-in functionality to closely inspect data, then interactively pan across the display with the ability to undo and redo edits. When ready, HawkEdit can save changes as binary data in CfRadial format, snap and save images of the displayed data, or both. HawkEdit offers an interactive color scale selection, including import of a color scale file and the ability to edit the color scales that visualize the field data. HawkEdit scripts work on a single data file, single sweep or scan, or work in batch mode with multiple files at once.

HawkEdit imports DORADE and CfRadial files. Together with RadxConvert, HawkEdit can import almost all radar and lidar data file formats. Instructional videos demonstrate HawkEdit in action for common quality control of airborne and ground-based radar data. HawkEdit has an evolving test bed of data inputs, expected outputs, and QC data editing scripts.

HawkEdit is a Mac application ready for installation. HawkEdit soon will be part of the LROSE suite of tools installed on Linux platforms. Along with the interactive side of HawkEdit, pySolo is a Python package of the Solo functions that can also edit data while respecting custom boundaries.