ARM

ARM’s Activities at the 40th AMS Conference on Radar Meteorology

Editor’s note: In January 2023, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy launched the Year of Open Science to advance national open science policies across the federal government. During the year, ARM is publishing a series of stories on work to advance open and equitable research. The following blog post is from Max Grover, a software developer at Argonne National Laboratory.

Graphic of a person holding a digital globe with lines and dots to indicate data being shared. The ARM and DOE logos are in white above the text "2023 Year of Open Science" in green.During the week of August 28, several Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility staff and members of the ARM community attended the 40th American Meteorological Society (AMS) Conference on Radar Meteorology in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This is a biennial meeting, with a typical attendance of over 400, including in-person and remote attendees.

Developers Meeting

Prior to the official start of the radar conference, ARM sponsored the second annual Open Radar Developers meeting. This meeting brought together developers from throughout the radar software tool stack, focusing on toolkits that are community-developed and openly available.

Since last year’s meeting in Locarno, Switzerland, the open radar community has made progress in:

  • the creation of the Open Radar Science Forum, a shared discussion forum for the open radar community
  • the creation of a dedicated shared input/output library (xradar)
  • the creation of a dedicated shared package for meteorology-focused colormaps (cmweather)
  • further development of the Project Pythia Radar Cookbook, which includes open recipes for radar meteorology.

Priorities for the next year were highlighted, with the primary focuses being:

Developers from the open radar community were thankful to have had the opportunity to come together, discuss successes, and establish ongoing partnerships in developing new tools for the weather radar community.

Two rows of people stand next to a large screen showing virtual participants.
Short course participants and instructors, both onsite in Minneapolis and attending virtually from around the world, pause for a photo.

Open Radar Short Course

A screenshot shows the top of ARM's Py-ART Basics page, including an overview of what will be covered in the notebook.
This image comes from the Python ARM Radar Toolkit (Py-ART) section of the short course, which was deployed on ARM’s JupyterHub.

ARM staff worked with the broader open radar science community to organize a short course with over 40 attendees. The primary theme for the short course was using open-source toolkits to work with weather radar data, with the primary data set of focus being C- and S-band radar data near the new ARM Mobile Facility site in Alabama’s Bankhead National Forest.

The University of Alabama in Huntsville’s ARMOR radar and the nearby National Weather Service-operated WSR-88D radar provided suitable data sets to test out a variety of wind retrieval methods. The entire data pipeline, from initial data conversion and cleaning to final wind retrieval visualization, was covered as a part of the course.

ARM’s JupyterHub served as the platform, with the short course tutorial content and software environment pre-installed for users. The ARM Data Center team provided technical support and helped users go through the registration process and get started on the platform.

Radar Conference

Zachary Sherman presents on perceptual uniformity and lightness. To achieve perceptual uniformity, color and data values are weighted equally as to not create artificial structure. Colormaps should have lightness that increases linearly.
Zachary Sherman, a software developer at Argonne National Laboratory, presents on the importance of designing colormaps for people affected by color vision deficiency (CVD), which is a decreased ability to discern between particular colors. Many CVD-friendly colormaps are available with the Py-ART package.

The radar conference included plenary sessions as well as academic talks, with numerous talks featuring ARM data and ARM-supported tools. Here is a list of presentations from ARM staff:

ARM data were used in over 20 presentations, primarily focusing on the recent TRACER and SAIL field campaigns.

Katie Dorsey

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