Reading Older NEXRAD Data and Fixing Latitude and Longitude Issues#

In this example, we will show how to read in older NEXRAD files prior to 2008 that are missing some coordinate metadata.

print(__doc__)


# Author: Zachary Sherman (zsherman@anl.gov)
# License: BSD 3 clause

Import our required packages.

import cartopy.crs as ccrs
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

import pyart

Read older NEXRAD Level 2 Data#

Older NEXRAD files prior to 2008, have the tendency to not contain some of the required metadata for Py-ART’s NEXRAD reader. This usually results in missing latitude and longitude data, so after reading with Py-ART, both coordinates have a value of 0. This example, we will show how to properly read in an older NEXRAD file.

First we want to get an older file from amazon web service:

s3://noaa-nexrad-level2/year/month/date/radarsite/{radarsite}{year}{month}{date}_{hour}{minute}{second}.gz

Where in our case, we are using a sample data file from Handford, CA (KHNX) on July 24, 2006, at 0203:38 UTC. This means our path would look like this:

# Note: Older files do not contain the 'V06' but instead '.gz' in the AWS path.

aws_nexrad_level2_file = (
    "s3://noaa-nexrad-level2/2006/07/24/KHNX/KHNX20060724_020338.gz"
)

We can use the pyart.io.read_nexrad_archive module to access our data, passing in the filepath.

radar = pyart.io.read_nexrad_archive(aws_nexrad_level2_file)
/users/wolfensb/pyrad/src/pyart/pyart/io/nexrad_archive.py:231: UserWarning: Gate spacing is not constant, interpolating data in scans [0, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15] for moment REF.
  warnings.warn(

Now let us take a look at the radar latitude and longitude data.

print(radar.latitude["data"])
print(radar.longitude["data"])
[0.]
[0.]

This is clearly not correct! The problem is the reader could not find the metadata (message 31) for the coordinates.

Lucky for us, we can provide the station in Py-ART’s NEXRAD reader, which will pull the coordinate information from a dictionary found within Py-ART.

radar = pyart.io.read_nexrad_archive(aws_nexrad_level2_file, station="KHNX")

Again, let us take a look at the radar latitude and longitude data.

print(radar.latitude["data"])
print(radar.longitude["data"])
[36.31417]
[-119.63111]

Everything now looks correct as this is in Handford CA!

# We can create a plot as well utilizing Cartopy to see how it looks.
display = pyart.graph.RadarMapDisplay(radar)

# Setting projection and ploting the first tilt.
projection = ccrs.LambertConformal(
    central_latitude=radar.latitude["data"][0],
    central_longitude=radar.longitude["data"][0],
)

fig = plt.figure(figsize=(6, 6))
display.plot_ppi_map(
    "reflectivity", 0, vmin=-20, vmax=54, projection=projection, resolution="10m"
)
KHNX 0.4 Deg. 2006-07-24T02:03:37.726000Z  Equivalent reflectivity factor

Total running time of the script: (0 minutes 14.999 seconds)

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