Introduce yourself to the community!

The community is growing! As we continue on our mission of democratizing knowledge in the weather radar community let’s introduce ourselves. Minimum information should be:
Your real name
Your location and, if different, your institute’s location
Your institute (or who you work mainly for)
What do you do?
Especially with respect to radar science, what are you trying to do?
A fun anecdote about yourself. can be professional of a non-work thing

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And I’ll get us started!
Greetings Community!
I am Scott Collis
I am in the suburbs of Chicago, IL, USA
My employer is Argonne National Laboratory. A DOE Office of Science Lab
I do a whole variety of projects. But as it pertains to radar I lead a team of scientists who value add (retrievals) to radar from DOE’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement User Facility.
My desire is to see a rich sustainable ecosystem of radar software (and beyond). I am working with others here to build an open community of practice around radar science.

I was no always a Python evangelist! I had to switch to Python working at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology as they did not have an IDL licence. I became an open science preacher after my first SciPy in 2012.

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This is Eric Téllez.
I’m in Mexico City, working at the Geophysics Institute at the National University of Mexico.
I’m operating a Furuno radar to monitor the Popocatepetl volcano.
I want to see if it is possible to separate water from ash in the radar signal.

I did an internship in Fermilab several years ago but I didn’t know that Argonne was very near of it. I always thought it was near Oak Ridge, hehe.

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I am Zach Sherman
I am in the suburbs of Chicago, IL, USA
My employer is Argonne National Laboratory. A DOE Office of Science Lab

I do software development for the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Group as well as for Geospatial Computing Sensing and Innovation. I mostly work on a variety of open source projects, mainly Py-ART and ACT, but I do also contribute to a few other projects as well. I started off as a Student Undergraduate Internship learning Python and having looked back since.

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Your real name

I am Max Grover (AKA @mgrover1 on Github)

Your location and, if different, your institute’s location

I live in the Southwestern Suburbs of Chicago, Illinois, in the USA!

What do you do?

I work for Argonne National Laboratory, which is one of the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science Labs :test_tube:

Especially with respect to radar science, what are you trying to do?

I work on:

  • Co-leading development of the Python ARM Radar Toolkit (Py-ART)
  • Co-leading development with xradar
  • Developing new educational materials + leading workshops related to learning the open radar science stack
  • Contributing to all things Open Science related to the DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility

I am especially interested in growing the open radar science community, entraining more people into the broader Pangeo ecosystem/community.

A fun anecdote about yourself. can be professional of a non-work thing

Some fun facts about me:

  • I worked as a tour boat captain and tour guide :anchor: for a few summers on a lake in Southern Wisconsin
  • I have a collection of ~50 Hawaiian shirts :palm_tree:
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Hello! My name is Joe O’Brien, and I am also based in the Chicago, IL suburbs.
My employer is Argonne National Laboratory. A DOE Office of Science Lab.

I work on a variety of projects relating in-situ atmospheric observations with Radar or LiDAR utilizing the Python ARM Radar Toolkit (Py-ART) and Atmospheric Community Toolkit (ACT).

I am a diehard NY Yankees fan and dream of one day turning all of these software development skills into running their analytics department

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I am Jordi Figueras i Ventura (AKA @jfigui on Github)

Your location and, if different, your institute’s location

I live in Catalonia but work for Météo-France in Toulouse, France

What do you do?

I work for de Centre de Météorologie Radar at Météo-France.

Especially with respect to radar science, what are you trying to do?

I work on:

  • Co-leading development of Pyrad
  • Bird detection and tracking with weather radars
  • Radar QPE and hydrometeor classification
  • Scattering properties of hydrometeors
  • Anything related to weather radar data processing really

A fun anecdote about yourself. can be professional of a non-work thing

Some fun facts about me:

  • I have worked for 3 different Met Services and lived in 5 different countries so far
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Your real name

I’m Kai Mühlbauer (@kmuehlbauer on GitHub).

Your location and, if different, your institute’s location

I live in the former capital of Germany, Bonn, in a nice neighborhood between the Rhine river and the Venusberg.

Your institute (or who you work mainly for)

I work for the University of Bonn, Institute of Geosciences, Meteorology Section.

What do you do?

I’m supervising and maintaining our weather radar and other remote sensors, data storage and accumulation. Got in touch with Python at ERAD 2012 in Toulouse through wradlib.

Especially with respect to radar science, what are you trying to do?

After graduating as engineer in Communications Technology, specialising in high-frequency physics, I worked for a decade in research and development of active and passive radar systems with Fraunhofer FHR. In 2009 I joined the former Institute of Meteorology at the University of Bonn.

Currently, my main work aspects are:

  • research and development of radar processing chain for the Twin-X-Band radars BoXPol (Bonn) and JuXPol (Jülich)
  • support of project scientists (data, processing)
  • radar polarimetry lecture (software part, Jupyter Notebooks)

Behind the scenes:

  • main developer of wradlib
  • Co-leading development with xradar ( :wave: Hi Max)
  • maintainer of h5netcdf, contributor to xarray and other Python packages

I’m working towards equipping the open radar science community with the needed tools to get the science done (citing one of my heroes of our community), trying to keep pace with the developments in the Python Scientific Software stack and beyond.

A fun anecdote about yourself. Can be professional or a non-work thing

During my apprenticeship as mechanic for data processing and office machines I was involved in repairing wire-wrapped backplanes/mainboards equipped with 8kB of RAM. Today this looks like technology from the stone Age.

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Hello Weather Radar Community,

My name is Hamid Ali Syed, and I’m a first-year Ph.D. student at Purdue University, pursuing atmospheric science under the mentorship of Prof. Dan Dawson and Prof. @rtanamachi. I’m excited to be a part of this supportive community and grateful for the opportunity to learn from experienced practitioners.

I’ve developed the Pyscancf package for Indian Meteorological Department’s Weather Radars and am passionate about using technology to understand atmospheric processes better. I want to thank @kmuehlbauer for his guidance and look forward to contributing to the ongoing conversation with the support of this wonderful community.

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Your real name
I’m Daniel Sanchez-Rivas

Your location and, if different, your institute’s location
I’m from Mexico, did my PhD at the University of Bristol, and now I live in Germany.

Your institute (or who you work mainly for)
I work for the University of Bonn, Institute of Geosciences, Meteorology Section.
Hi, @kmuehlbauer :smiley:

What do you do?
I work on:

  • Developing a radar processing chain using X-band radar data.
  • Optimising Radar QPE algorithms.

A fun anecdote about yourself. can be professional of a non-work thing
I enjoy absurdly bad movies that are fun to watch. An apocalyptic world ruled by radar processors would be an excellent idea for a movie!

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Hello, guys and Weather radar community,

My name is Adithiy R (“R” Stands for Raghunathan"), Doing my masters in Atmospheric Science at Cochin University of Science and Technology (CUSAT) In Kerala, India. Currently Working As a Project fellow at IITM (Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, India). The Project work mainly focuses of studying Extreme precipitation events Using Ground and Space-based Radars

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Hi All! This is Alfonso Ladino.

I am from Colombia (South America). Currently living in Urbana, IL. I am doing my Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences at UIUC, working with Steve Nesbitt on warm precipitation and cloud microphysics. My research interest is focused on physical and machine learning techniques to improve surface rainfall estimation from spaceborne and ground-based radars.

I am a coffee lover and a python enthusiast. I enjoy spending a few hours coding. Always interested in new advances in radar/meteorology/big data/remote sensors/data streaming and visualization. I look forward to contributing to the radar community.

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Your real name
Laura Tomkins
Your location and, if different, your institute’s location
Located in Raleigh, North Carolina
Your institute (or who you work mainly for)
North Carolina State University
What do you do?
I am working on a Ph.D. in Geospatial Analytics. My research is focused on understanding heavy snow features in winter storms in the Northeast US.
Especially with respect to radar science, what are you trying to do?
I have been working with data from the NEXRAD radar network to create regional composites of winter storms from 1996-present.
A fun anecdote about yourself. can be professional of a non-work thing
I’m a dual citizen of the UK and the US. I was born in the UK and moved to North Carolina when I was 5.

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Your real name
Ricardo Reinoso-Rondinel

Your location and, if different, your institute’s location
I live in Limburg, the Netherlands, near the country border of Belgium and Germany

Your institute (or who you work mainly for)
In the past, I was affiliated with the ARRC @ OU, GRS @ TU Delft, and MeteoBonn @ UniBonn. Currently, I work at the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven) and the Royal Meteorological Institute (KMI/RMI) in Brussels, Belgium.

What do you do?
I’m an assistant professor and workleader on the topic of Nowcasting/Forecasting of Extreme Precipitation for Impact-based Warning Systems

Especially with respect to radar science, what are you trying to do?
Use the capabilities of dual-polarimetric weather radars to improve QPE products as well as the nowcasting and forecasting of precipitation fields and their application to verify NWP models.

A fun anecdote about yourself
So far I have worked in 5 countries and have no regrets :slight_smile:

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Your real name

I’m Robert Jackson. (@rcjackson on GitHub)

Your location and, if different, your institute’s location

I work at Argonne National Laboratory just outside of Chicago.

What do you do?

I am a scientist who works on artificial intelligence applications for lidar as well as convective processes.

Especially with respect to radar science, what are you trying to do?

I am the lead developer of PyDDA, a Python multi-Doppler wind retrieval package. I also am currently looking at radar data from the DOE TRACER campaign to look at the microphysics of developing convection.

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Your real name

I am Sean Freeman (freemansw1 on GitHub: https://github.com/freemansw1 )

Your location and, if different, your institute’s location

I live in Huntsville, AL, US.

What do you do?

I am an Assistant Professor in Atmospheric and Earth Science at The University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Especially with respect to radar science, what are you trying to do?

I track clouds and storms in radar, satellite, and model data to understand how clouds form, develop, and propagate. I’m also quite interested in cloud microphysics and how we can examine that from radar.

I’m one of the core developers of tobac, a tracking package that tracks clouds and storms in any dataset and on any (semi-regular or regular) grid.

A fun anecdote about yourself. can be professional of a non-work thing

I’m a curler! Love curling.

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Real name Daniel Michelson (DanielMichelson (Daniel Michelson) · GitHub)
Location Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Institute Environment and Climate Change Canada
What I do? Research Manager, Meteorological Research Division. Also Chair of WMO Joint Expert Team on Operational Weather Radar.
Especially with respect to radar science, what am I trying to do? Exploit the capabilities of Canada’s new network of S-band polarimetric weather radars using an Open Science approach.
An anecdote (or two) about myself I started using Python at version 1.2, first with satellite data, then with radar. I was the project manager of the BALTRAD and BALTRAD+ projects.

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Hello everyone!

Your real name: Julian Alberto Giles
Your location and, if different, your institute’s location: Bonn, Germany
Your institute (or who you work mainly for): University of Bonn, Institute of Geosciences, Meteorology Section
What do you do?: I am a Physicist and PhD in Atmospheric Sciences from Argentina and I moved to Germany six months ago to work as a Postdoc researcher in an interdisciplinary project called DETECT, led by several German institutions.
Especially with respect to radar science, what are you trying to do?: I had never worked with radar data before coming to Germany. I must say that the learning curve is quite steep! I would like to contribute to make working with radar data more accessible. Regarding my role in DETECT, I am exploring precipitation-generating processes using polarimetric radar data from Germany and Turkey. I will use this data to validate the results from high-resolution climate simulations that are being produced by other members of the project. I will use the forward operator EMVORADO to “translate” the modal data to radar space.
A fun anecdote about yourself. can be professional or a non-work thing: When I arrived to Germany I was surprised by the fact that you cannot easily find cold beer (or beverages in general) in supermarkets here, everything is room temperature and be thankful if you find 1 fridge with a couple of brands of beer and some juice bottles. You have to go to a kiosk to get cold beverages, typically at a markup price.

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Your real name
David Dufton
Your location and, if different, your institute’s location
I live in the UK, in a small town called Brighouse, which is about 15 miles west of Leeds where NCAS is based (among other locations).
Your institute (or who you work mainly for)
I work for the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) in the UK.
What do you do?
I mainly write code to calibrate, process and analyse weather radar data, typically from NCAS’s mobile dual-pol X-band radar. My background is in hydrology and flood risk management but I’ve worked with radar data for over 10 years and first started using open source radar processing tools after attending a short course at ERAD in 2014.
Especially with respect to radar science, what are you trying to do?
I work closely with hydrological modellers in the UK, providing Quantitative Precipitation Estimates for them to use in their models. This involves all aspects of the radar processing chain from calibration through to gridding. I’m also working on the DCMex project, looking at deep convection in New Mexico using dual-polarisation radar data alongside a whole host of data (aircraft and ground based) collected as part of a field campaign in 2022.
A fun anecdote about yourself. can be professional of a non-work thing
I’m a keen runner, and even took my running gear to New Mexico last year for the DCMex field campaign. Needless to say it was a little warmer than running here in the UK, I had to get up pretty early to make it bearable.

Hy , I am jagdish jena
from Odisha ,India
currently pursuing my master in atmospheric science at National Institute of Technology ,Rourkela
I did my internship project at Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre,ISRO on Monsoon using Doppler weather radar observation.