NEXRAD Level II Archive Tool

This tool uses Spatialite (https://www.gaia-gis.it/fossil/libspatialite/index) in conjunction with the NCEI Storm Events Database (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/swdi/stormevents/csvfiles/) to archive only NEXRAD Level II data for which storms were recorded by the National Weather Service. Using the start and end times and coordinates of a given storm report, this tool is able to query and filter objects in the NEXRAD Level II Amazon bucket (https://registry.opendata.aws/noaa-nexrad/), allowing one to only archive volume scans for which storms were noted, from the appropriate radar sites.

Building

Simply run make to produce a Docker image pre-populated with the NEXRAD radar site database.

Running

Invoke sh run.sh to run this archival tool, passing two arguments:

• The path to a storm events database CSV export file, whose name as obtained from the NCEI begins with StormEvents_details_. Only these files contain the start and end coordinates of a storm which are used to select data from the correct radar sites.

• A path to a destination directory where archived data shall be downloaded. Note that files downloaded under this directory will be organized in the YYYY/MM/DD/SITE/ hierarchy.

Other optional arguments will be passed through to the bin/nexrad-archive executable within the Docker image:

• --dry-run

  This will avoid actually performing any archiving; instead, the tool will indicate what actions it would take.

• --quiet

  Suppresses standard output.