Earth’s atmosphere can be described as a fluid surrounding a rotating sphere that is differentially heated more at the equator than at the poles. One complication to this simple system are the heterogenous components in this fluid: particulate matter, cloud and rain drops and ice crystals. Understanding spatial distributions and properties of clouds and rain systems is vital to improving earth system simulations (across scales). Radars are a key tool used by the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program of the Department of Energy. The Data Informatics and Geophysical Retrievals group at Argonne has a long history of working with radars from ARM and other agencies in order to extract geophysical insight. As the group developed ideas they were packaged into the Python-ARM Radar Toolkit, Py-ART. Owing in part to good software engineering practices, Py-ART, partly funded by ARM and available on GitHub, has surpassed 60,000 downloads and is used in academia, private industry, defense and internationally. This presentation will introduce ARM, give a background on dual polarimetric radar remote sensing, discuss several science applications and then wax lyrical on the role of community software in accelerating knowledge transfer in Science.

Argonne Physics Division Colloquium Schedule