Pyrad: A Real-Time Weather Radar Data Processing Framework Based on Py-ART

Abstract

Pyrad is a real-time data processing framework developed by MeteoSwiss. The framework is aimed at reading, processing and visualizing polar data from individual weather radars as well as composite Cartesian products both off-line and in real time. The processing flow is controlled by three simple configuration files. This allows the construction of reproducible data processing chains. In the off-line mode, data from multiple radars can be ingested. It is written in the Python programming language. Most of the signal processing and part of the data visualization is performed by a MeteoSwiss-developed version of the Py-ART radar toolkit, which contains enhanced features. Thanks to the broad types of input files accepted and its flexibility it can be easily adapted and used by any member of the weather radar community. The source code is available on GitHub. Compiled versions are also available on PyPI and conda-forge. They are distributed under a BSD license.

Keywords

• python
• radar
• weather radar
• quality control
• real-time
• visualization
• data processing