Overview

Chilbolton IQ time-series data

This documentation describes time-series data collected using ground-based radars at Chilbolton Obervatory in the UK.

Level 1 calibrated data in NetCDF-4 format (see File format description) are provided from the following three radars:

  • 3GHz CAMRa radar (ncas-radar-camra-1)

  • 35GHz Copernicus radar (ncas-radar-ka-band-1)

  • 94GHz Galileo radar (ncas-radar-w-band-1)

The data are arranged into a series of one or more rain events per day of observation, with any extended non-rainy periods being omitted. The data may be read by a variety of standard packages including MATLAB, IDL and R, as well as by tailored programs written in Python, C or Fortran. For full documentation of the NetCDF standard see https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/. Documentation is provided for the Python routines used in the processing chain leading to these Level 1 data.

A set of height-time quicklooks is also provided to enable the user to identify periods of particular interest. An example is given below.

_images/example_quicklook_w-band.png

Python routines are provided for the production of such quicklooks. Specifically, they use the time-series data to generate plots of radar equivalent reflectivity and of pulse-pair estimates of the Doppler velocity. No velocity unfolding is performed.