Cf/Radial - A Radar and Lidar Data Format for data providers, end users, and tool providers

Cf/Radial is a CF compliant netCDF convention for radial data from radar and lidar platforms that supports both airborne and ground-based sensors. Because of its CF-compliance, CfRadial will allow researchers familiar with CF to read the data into a wide variety of analysis tools, models etc.

For data providers, using a common data format allows more users to display and analyze your data with a wider choice of tools and computer languages.  For display and analysis tool providers, supporting CfRadial allows more data providers and end users to use your tools. For data users, more radar/lidar data can be used without translation.  Also, more display and analysis tools and languages can read and process your radar/lidar data.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Earth Observing Laboratory provides a C++ library and applications to read/write CfRadial, DORADE, UF, FORAY-1, NEXRAD, and SIGMET formats. Since CfRadial is based on netCDF  anyone can use popular languages such as Matlab, IDL, and Python to generate or analyze radar/lidar data.

NCAR, Unidata, DOE/ARM, NOAA/NSSL, various universities, and commercial radar vendors(EEC andPro Sensing) are using Cf/Radial.