Lidar Radar Open Software Environment

Overview

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), and is funded by the US National Science Foundation.

The project's overall goal 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 hosted in the Remote Sensing Facility (RSF)



Development Approach

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

Supported LAOF

A significant portion of the NSF LAOF and legacy data sets are supported by the LROSE software, and includes:

  • S-Pol Radar
  • UIUC DOWs and COW
  • HIAPER Cloud Radar (HCR) 
  • Wyoming Cloud Radar (WCR)
  • GV-HSRL
  • Multi-Pulse DIAL (MPD)
  • 915 MHz profilers
  • 449 MHz profilers
  • CSU/CHILL (retired)
  • ELDORA (retired)

Collaboration

As an Open Source project, the success of LROSE depends on effective collaboration with other organizations.

The following organizations are currently collaborating on LROSE: