Processing WSR-88D Level 2 Radar Data using WDSS-II on Amazon Web Services

The increase in the availability and ease of use in cloud computing over the last few years allows for testing of the feasibility of transferring meteorological software onto these systems. The big data research agreement between NOAA and Amazon Web Services (AWS) has allowed for entire NCEI weather surveillance and ranging (WSR-88D) level 2 radar data archive to be accessed from a public Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3). This allows for easy utilization of the computing and storage resources available from AWS. Using computing instances from AWS, the Warning Decision Support System – Integrated Information (WDSS-II) software was deployed onto the AWS cloud and scaled to process radar data over the United States and merge together the single radar data into a single product for use in the Multi-Year Reanalysis of Remotely Sensed Storms (MYRORSS) project.

The advantages/disadvantages of using AWS to process radar data in this framework will be discussed. Techniques using python to implement automatic processing of WSR-88D radar data using python will be shown. Including how to manage the processing work flow of data using AWS APIs. Insight and lessons learned into the ability of using AWS to perform research using radar data will be discussed.