CfRadial - CF NetCDF for Radar and Lidar Data in Polar Coordinates.
Abstract
Since 1990, NCAR has supported over 20 different data formats for radar and lidar data in polar coordinates. Researchers, students and operational users spend unnecessary time handling a multitude of unique formats. CfRadial grew out of the need to simplify the use of these data and thereby to improve efficiency in research and operations. CfRadial adopts the well-known NetCDF framework, along with the Climate and Forecasting (CF) conventions such that data and metadata are accurately represented. Mobile platforms are also supported. The first major release, CfRadial version 1.1, occurred in February 2011, followed by minor updates. CfRadial has been adopted by NCAR as well as other agencies in the US and the UK. CfRadial development was boosted in 2015 through a two-year NSF EarthCube grant to improve CF in general. Version 1.4 was agreed upon in May 2016, adding explicit support for quality control fields and spectra. In Europe and Australia, EUMETNET OPERA's HDF5-based ODIM_H5 standard has been rapidly embraced as the modern standard for exchanging weather radar data for operations. ODIM_H5 exploits data groups, hierarchies, and built-in compression, characteristics that have been added to NetCDF4. A meeting of the WMO Task Team on Weather Radar Data Exchange (TT-WRDE) was held at NCAR in Boulder in July 2016, with a goal of identifying a single global standard for radar and lidar data in polar coordinates. CfRadial and ODIM_H5 were considered alongside the older and more rigid table-driven WMO BUFR and GRIB2 formats. TT-WRDE recommended that CfRadial 1.4 be merged with the sweep-oriented structure of ODIM_H5, making use of NetCDF groups, to produce a single format that will encompass the best ideas of both formats. That has led to the emergence of the CfRadial 2.0 standard. This format should meet the objectives of both the NSF EarthCube CF 2.0 initiative and the WMO TT-WRDE. It has the added benefit of improving data exchange between operational and research users, making operational data more readily available to researchers, and research algorithms more accessible to operational agencies.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUFMIN23A1761D
- Keywords:
-
- 1904 Community standards;
- INFORMATICSDE: 1936 Interoperability;
- INFORMATICSDE: 1946 Metadata;
- INFORMATICSDE: 1982 Standards;
- INFORMATICS