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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.

Display colormaps

Cloud Radar display colors follow Py-ART radar conventions with selected colorblind-friendly cmweather overrides. The dashboard keeps the palette definitions local in radar_colormaps.py so the deployed app and quicklook generators do not require Py-ART or cmweather at runtime.

Dashboard variable Radar colormap
ZE_dBZ HomeyerRainbow
ZE45_dBZ HomeyerRainbow
MeanVel balance
SpecWidth SpectralExtended
ZDR RefDiff
RHV RefDiff
DiffAtt RefDiff
SLDR SCook18
PhiDP Wild25
KDP Theodore16
SRCX Carbone17
Kurt Carbone17
Skew BuDRd18

The existing dashboard value limits remain tuned for the deployed W-band cloud radar product. Velocity uses the balanced diverging palette, spectrum width uses the extended spectral palette, and SLDR uses the original SCook18 radar palette.

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"