NEXRAD radar — catalog & tooling

Station catalog

earthlens.radar ships a station registry, radar_data_catalog.yaml, loaded by StationCatalog. It maps each four-letter WSR-88D ICAO id (KTLX) to its name, latitude, longitude, and US state — giving every fetched volume a point geometry and letting a request discover the radars inside a bounding box.

The catalog is informational: any valid four-letter site id can be fetched even if it is absent from the catalog (the assembled volume just gets no point geometry). It currently holds 210 sites — the full NOAA WSR-88D network.

from earthlens.radar import StationCatalog

cat = StationCatalog()
len(cat.datasets)                       # 210
cat.get_station("KTLX")                 # Station(name='Oklahoma City', ...)
cat.in_bbox(-100, 33, -95, 37)          # ['KFDR', 'KINX', 'KTLX', 'KVNX', ...]

get_station raises a ValueError with a did-you-mean hint for an unknown id, matching the other backends' catalogs.

Tooling

Two earthlens datasets verbs keep the catalog honest:

Command	Purpose
refresh radar --write	Regenerate radar_data_catalog.yaml from NOAA HOMR's authoritative nexrad-stations.txt (fixed-width parse; ICAO / name / state / lat / lon).
validate radar --live	Cross-check the catalog against the live chunk feed — flags an unreachable / empty feed, or an id-format mismatch (the feed is non-empty but no catalogued station is in it).

earthlens datasets refresh radar           # diff the catalog against live HOMR
earthlens datasets refresh radar --write    # rewrite the catalog
earthlens datasets validate radar --live    # confirm the real-time feed is reachable

Because the feed is a rolling ~1–2 h buffer, per-station idleness is expected at any instant (sites between scans or briefly offline) — so validate --live only flags a fully empty feed or a wholesale id mismatch, not per-site idleness.