Data Input - Data Output

The binary encoding of many radar products is a major obstacle for many potential radar users. Often, decoder software is not easily available. In case formats are documented, the implementation of decoders is a major programming effort.

Note

For radar data in polar format (eg. rays vs. range) the openradar community published xradar where xarray-based readers/writers are implemented. That particular code was ported from \(\omega radlib\) to xradar. Please refer to xradar for enhancements for polar radar.

This tutorial provides an overview of the data formats currently supported by \(\omega radlib\). We seek to continuously enhance the range of supported formats, so this document is only a snapshot. If you need a specific file format to be supported by \(\omega radlib\), please raise an issue of type enhancement. You can provide support by adding documents which help to decode the format, e.g. format reference documents or software code in other languages for decoding the format.

At the moment, supported format means that the radar format can be read and further processed by wradlib. Normally, wradlib will return a numpy array of data values and a dictionary of metadata - if the file contains any.

Warning

Since \(\omega radlib\) version 1.18 the xarray backend engines for polar radar data have been renamed and prepended with wradlib- (eg. cfradial1 -> wradlib-cfradial1). This was necessary to avoid clashes with the new xradar-package, which will eventually replace the wradlib engines. Users have to make sure to check which engine to use for their use-case when using xarray.open_dataset.

Since \(\omega radlib\) version 1.19 the xarray backend engines for polar radar data have been deprecated. The functionality is kept until wradlib version 2.0, when the backend-code will be removed completely. wradlib is importing that functionality from xradar-package whenever and wherever necessary.

This section provides a collection of example code snippets to show which data formats \(\omega radlib\) can handle and and how to facilitate that.