Recently the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) climate facility enhanced its observational capabilities with a network of X- and C-band scanning precipitation radars. In order to make the data more accessible to the cloud and climate modeling community, Value Added Products (VAPs), essentially retrievals of geophysical parameters from the remote sensing data, are generated and saved in NetCDF format. In addition to distributing these VAPS, the ARM facility intends to distribute the algorithms used in the form of a radar toolkit, called Py-ART, the Python ARM Radar Toolkit. Py-ART will include all the tools required to read data from ARM radars, correct for aliasing and attenuation, map the data to a Cartesian grid, perform a basic set of geophysical retrievals on the data and write the data out to a Climate Forecasting standard NetCDF File. This presentation will outline the structure of the toolkit and some of the challenges faced in adapting older code in FORTAN and C to Python as well as writing new, performance orientated code in Python.