radar. IRIS: A free, open and transparent R library for processing Canada's weather radar data

摘要

This research develops a freely available, transparent and open software library, in the R language, for accessing and manipulating weather radar observations from the Canadian Weather Radar Network (CWRN). The CWRN consists of 30 C-band Doppler radar installations, plus one S-band Doppler radar installation at McGill University. The data from the 30 C-band radars are archived in a proprietary data format called the Interactive Radar Information System (IRIS), and software to access this data format is not yet readily available to the research community. The library developed in this research opens IRIS weather radar data files and performs a suite of common weather-radar data processing procedures such as Z-R conversion, gridding and point estimation. The use and utility of this software package is explored in a case study investigating an extreme rainfall event in the City of Kamloops, British Columbia.