GenericRadar v0.6.0

A native NEXRAD radar workstation. No accounts, no API keys, no telemetry.

New in this release

Open a file by browsing for one. Until now a file was opened by typing
its path or dropping it on the window, both of which assume you already know
which file you want. There is now a browser drawn in the application's own
chrome — identical on every platform — reached from File > Browse… or the
button beside Load.

It identifies what it lists by reading it. Each row's first 8 KiB goes
through the same format sniff the loader uses, so a volume stored with no
extension at all still says NEXRAD Archive II, and a screenshot sitting
beside it says it is not radar data. Nothing is hidden by filename. The
folder you were last in is remembered between sessions, and is also on the
Data settings page so it can be seen and cleared.

Level 1 (I/Q) time series. Vaisala RVP8/RVP900 records are read and the
moments are estimated in the application from the pulses themselves by
pulse-pair processing — reflectivity, velocity, spectrum width and RhoHV —
rather than read back from a processor's output. The dwell length, the window
(rectangular, von Hann, Hamming, Blackman) and the SNR threshold are yours to
set, under Settings > Level 1 (I/Q), and a Doppler spectrum can be drawn
for a chosen gate.

A time-series header states a signal processor, not a position, so these
records have to be located. The radars that publish them are research
installations, which by definition are absent from the operational station
directory the application already carries. KOUN and KCRI are now in a small
catalogue whose every coordinate cites the NCEI HOMR station it came from.
Where a record cannot be located it still says so rather than guessing —
mobile radars are deliberately not in that table, because their position is
in each deployment's own file and a fixed entry would be wrong by tens of
kilometres on all but one deployment.

CfRadial in netCDF-4. CfRadial 1.x files in netCDF-4/HDF5 containers now
open directly. Previously only the classic container was read, and a
netCDF-4 file had to be converted with nccopy -k classic first — which is
the container most CfRadial files in the wild actually use.

Downloads

GenericRadar.exe is the Windows build that was run and checked before this
release was published.

SHA-256: e571b4e1abbc0ab3172ace9dc71a94635d21f1b48f9c7a52f2926cc6e71d1994

The macOS and Linux archives beside it are built by CI from this same tag and
the same lockfile. They are not flight-tested.

The binaries are unsigned. Windows SmartScreen will warn on first run — More
info, then Run anyway. On macOS, right-click the app and choose Open.

Data sources

• NEXRAD Level II: NOAA/NWS, read from the Unidata-hosted
  unidata-nexrad-level2 and unidata-nexrad-level2-chunks buckets
• Warnings and site metadata: NOAA/NWS api.weather.gov
• Imagery: USGS The National Map (public domain); © OpenStreetMap
  contributors, under the Open Database License (ODbL)

This repository also redistributes real radar files as decoder test fixtures,
including material used under CC BY 4.0 from EUMETNET OPERA / AEMET, EUMETNET
OPERA / SMHI and NOAA. Every one of them, and the terms it is carried under,
is listed in DATA-SOURCES.md.

MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option.