LROSE is a 4-year joint project between the Atmospheric Science Department at Colorado State University (CSU) and the Earth Observing Laboratory (EOL) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). It is funded by the US National Science Foundation.
The overall goal of the project is to provide high-quality, open source software to the community of scientists, researchers and operational organizations using atmospheric lidars, radars and profilers.
NSF provided seed funding in 2012 and 2013 to kick-start development while the main proposal was processed.
In 2014 and 2015, the LROSE proposal was submitted to the NSF Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure.
The project was funded in August 2016 by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), via the SI2 initiative. (See https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1550597). The current funding period runs from 2016 through 2020.
Supplemental funding has been provided by the NCAR Director's office.
LROSE is based on collaborative, open source software development. The code is freely available on the web under a BSD-style license.
The core framework upon which LROSE is based was developed by the PIs over a number of years prior to the start of the project.
The goal of the project is to build upon this base framework to add functionality that is seen as a high priority by the user community. We want to make the software up-to-date, relevant, easy to use and robust. Testing will be carried out at CSU, EOL and in the universities in general. Documentation and other aids, such as 'starter kits', will be provided to help the users to get started and make progress as efficiently as possible.
Data to be stored in portable data formats, based on UNIDATA NetCDF, following the Climate and Forecasting (CF) conventions to facilitate data assimilation by models.
LROSE core software components
Since the scope of software for radar and lidar is large, the software is organized into modular libraries and applications. The size of the modules in LROSE is chosen to keep the software maintainable, while also keeping the number of modules reasonable.
LROSE is intended to handle information at all stages:
raw time series data at the instrument in native format
moments data in radial coordinates
algorithms in radial coordinates
products in Cartesian coordinates
engineering displays
science displays that integrate with other data sets for visualization
provision of QC data to models for data assimilation
The software in the lrose core contains all of these components, as depicted in the following schematic: