An open source software for rainfall data analysis

What is it about?

Rainfall exhibits a high spatial and temporal variability. Weather radars can capture this extensively and provide highly resolved rainfall data for large areas. However, these datasets can consist of several thousand or even millions of files. Processing such an amount of data requires considerable programming skills and there is a scarcity of freely available software tools to automate this process. This paper presents the open source software package radproc written in Python as an approach to facilitate the processing and analysis of gridded weather radar and point-scale rain gauge data as well as their export to geodata formats.

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Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The Python package radproc presented in this paper is the first open source software to provide support for long-term 5-minute German radar climatology (RADKLIM) weather radar data processing and analysis. Thus, it contributes to facilitating radar data processing, allowing non-specialised users to cope with the vast amount of data. The tool can help to enable radar data usage for all applications that benefit from high resolution precipitation data. Moreover, radproc's modular design allows for a high extensibility in terms of new input data and analysis methods.