Background

In recent years, more and more Open Source Software (OSS) packages have become available to the weather radar community (see here). Still, we have to admit that some barriers prevent us from tapping the full potential of OSS, such as nasty installation procedures, platform dependency and support issues, and steep learning curves.

In order to address some of these issues, we present a community-based and open Virtual Machine (VM).

Turn-key solution

Skip nasty installation procedures and stop worrying about dependencies.

Just get started quickly with readily-built VM appliances.

Forget platform issues

For various software packages, different operating systems might have particular issues, or may not be supported at all. Windows users in particular will know that scientific software packages in Atmospheric Sciences are often supported for Linux only.

The VM can be run on any platform by using VirtualBox. This way, you do not have to worry about platform support issues.

Reproducibility

The concept of reproducibility is at the very heart of the VM. It is not just a convenient tool. It gurantees comparable and reproducible results anywhere it is run. Distribute it among colleagues or students: same input, same result. Think about the possiblities in teaching, but also in scientific peer review.

System integration

The VM is a machine on its own, but you can easily mount any drives of your computer or network, or even run it in the cloud.