Features

The Virtual Machine (VM) is based on Linux (Ubuntu) and comes with a number of open source weather radar software packages. The VM can be run using VirtualBox on most operating systems (Linux, Mac, Windows).

Weather Radar Software

BALTRAD

Py-ART

wradlib

Radx

PyTMatrix

Python

The VM comes with a scientific Python stack, including the most important Python Packages for scientific computing (NumPy, SciPy and many more), and jupyter in order to run the course notebooks.

See Quick start to see how to run jupyter notebooks on the VM.

Two Python distributions

Right now, we are in a phase of transition in which some packages have already moved on to Python 3, while others still rely on Python 2 (see here for some background).

As a result, the VM, as of now, contains two Python distributions:

• the system Python is 2.7, and the installation of Python packages is based on the Debian 9 (Stretch) package manager. The system Python is mainly used by the BALTRAD package.
• the VM also contains Miniconda with Python 3.6. Using the conda package manager, we maintain a 3.6 conda Python environment that contains wradlib, Py-ART and PyTMatrix.

As a result, the interoperability demos for BALTRAD, Py-ART, and wradlib are, as of now, not operational. We are working on a solution to integrate all packages in a unified Python environment, again.

See Quick start to see how jupyter notebooks can be invoked in the two different Python environments.

Webserver

The VM also contains an Apache Webserver.

Course materials

The VM contains courses with recipes and examples in order to make you familiar with the different software packages. Some examples also show how to combine different weather radar packages.

See courses for further details.