Quick Guide: NCAS Radar Data Standard
What is the NCAS Radar Data Standard?
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The NCAS Radar data standard builds on CF-Radial, an extension of the NetCDF CF Conventions for RADAR and LIDAR data in polar coordinates, with the aim of increasing the interoperability of these data with other data, such as those following the other NCAS data standards. It draws on many aspects developed within the NCAS General standard, including approaches to capturing information about the data collection and production as well as following the same file naming convention. |
As such it is designed to capture all the information needed to make sure the data in the files are self-describing, and contain details about the people, projects, and instruments responsible for taking the measurements.
When to Use it
The NCAS Radar data standard should be used for all NCAS observational data from radars and lidar units where radial coordinates are required. (Otherwise these are already covered by the NCAS General standard). Whilst primarily intended for NCAS data to be archived at the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA) archive, the basis of this standard can also be used for non-NCAS observational data, with some adjustments needed to account for any differences in licence or required acknowledgements.
How to use it
As data files using the NCAS Radar standard are of netCDF format, there are many tools available to use that can produce NCAS-Radar compliant files, in the majority of programming languages. Examples of these tools include the netCDF4 and xarray modules for Python programming.
Tools
netCDF libraries for C, C++, Fortran and Java
Further Details
For the full NCAS-Radar documentation see: https://ncas-radar-data-standard.readthedocs.io/en/1.0.0/overview.html