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.

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