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Cloud Radar Zarr

Path:

  • /data/aurora/products/rpgfmcw94/cloud_radar.zarr

Dataset shape

  • dimensions: time, range
  • deployed shape when checked on 2026-05-21:
  • time=321488
  • range=312
  • time coverage when checked: 2026-05-09 08:59:59.305 to 2026-05-21 19:59:54
  • sorted unique time coordinate

Coordinates

  • time - derived from Time + Timems
  • range - concatenated chirp range gates from C1Range and C2Range

Variable layout

This store currently contains 13 float32 time x range fields:

  • ZE_dBZ
  • ZE45_dBZ
  • MeanVel
  • ZDR
  • SRCX
  • SpecWidth
  • SLDR
  • Skew
  • RHV
  • PhiDP
  • Kurt
  • KDP
  • DiffAtt

Radar housekeeping fields such as Status, DDVolt, PowIF, TTemp, RTemp, PCTemp, Elv, Azm, SurfTemp, and SurfRelHum are not stored in this science Zarr. The HK_Radar quicklook reads those support variables from the mirrored raw RPG LV1 files under /project/aurora/raw/rpgfmcw94.

Conversion notes

  • reflectivity-style fields are converted to dBZ during ingest
  • fill values at or below the radar missing-data sentinel are converted to NaN
  • the builder drops NaT and clearly bogus future timestamps before writing; the dashboard also keeps a defensive future-time mask for plot bounds
  • append runs track the range layout and automatically rebuild a fresh store when a new contiguous raw-file run arrives with a different radar geometry
  • append writes materialize only the already-filtered new block before writing, avoiding partial chunk appends that can create false all-NaN vertical stripes in one radar moment while other moments remain valid

Chunking

  • radar science variables are chunked (400, full-range)

Useful root attributes

Examples seen in the deployed store:

  • range_count = 312
  • range_layout_key = "312:fd69e3de8501"