Prof Baldwin develops open software tool

01-15-2016

Writer(s): Jill Wable

Professor Michael Baldwin, Associate Professor EAPS, and Stephen Harrell from ITaP Research Computing recently had their work highlighted on blog posts. Amazon Web Services featured a story discussing their newly developed WeatherPipe tool and its use with Next Generation Weather Radar (NEXRAD) weather data.

Earlier this year, Amazon Web Services made known that the NEXRAD data would available for use by anyone. Upon learning this information, Prof. Baldwin knew that he may now be able to conduct analysis that was impossible before due to the prior data limitations.

He began working with Stephen Harrell to create a tool to make analyzing the NEXRAD data easier. Through this collaboration, they developed the WeatherPipe tool, an open source java tool which streamlines the process of making the NEXRAD data usable within Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) to create display files for average of radar reflectivity over time.

They were also included in a blog post by www.opensource.com as a “best of 2015” example of “open science”. The accolade comes as a follow-up from a post earlier in the year by Ben Cotton, Purdue University alumnus (MS/TECH 2014 and BS/EAPS 2006), where he discusses the role of “open software” and “open data” in modern meteorology.

 To read the related stories:

• https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/nexrad/
• https://opensource.com/life/15/12/best-of-science
• https://opensource.com/education/15/7/open-source-meteorology-tools