A Python wrapper for NASA's Radar Software Library

This paper demonstrates a modern and relatively lightweight tool chain for using weather radar data, and, more generally, shows the ease of interfacing a well-structured low-level library with Python's excellent high-level numerics and visualization.The NASA Radar Software Library, developed in support of the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, reads and/or converts a variety of common radar formats such as NEXRAD and UF.  A simple wrapper is described that uses Python's built-in ctypes module to load the RSL library and read its data structures into NumPy arrays. Simple examples are shown of coordinate system conversion and plotting using other free Python tools such as Matplotlib. Code for the wrapper and examples will be provided.