[Incubator] motion: wradlib application / community module

[Maik Heistermann]

Dear colleagues,

I am Maik, one of the wradlib developers. I certainly do not want to
interfer with your internal discussion. I just noticed Bruce Bannerman's
message, and I would like to briefly respond in order to maybe clarify
one or two issues.

First of all, thank you very much for considering this request, and also
for sharing your concerns.

However, the ideas outlined in the mentioned GRASS wiki article [1]
relate to the analysis of SAR images (airborne or spaceborn) which are
concerned with the radar-based exploration of the earth surface.
wradlib, in contrast, is concerned with the analysis of weather radar
observations for exploring atmosperic properties (mostly rainfall) in 2
or 3 dimensions. The underlying analytical framework differs in wide
parts as we need to understand the propagation of the radar beam and its
interaction with the atmosphere. The target variables (e.g.
precipitation intensity, wind speed, state of matter) fundamentally differ.

I fully agree to avoid re-inventing the wheel. wradlib was in fact
motivated by that very ambition. To my knowledge, it was the first
published Open Source effort to this end. Meanwhile, other Open Source
packages ([2], [3]) have been published, and we are closely cooperating
with these projects in order to enhance inter-operability and
harmonisation [4].

Still, wradlib tries to build on existing packages as good as possible,
so we make in fact heavy usage of gdal for georeferencing and raster
processing, but also of e.g. numpy, scipy, netcdf4 and h5py.

I hope this response helps to better understand the rationale behind
wradlib. Again, I would like to thank you for taking the time to
scrutinize our request to become an OSGeo community project. I am
looking forward to your decision.

Kind regards,
Maik

[1] https://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Radar_data_processing
[2] http://arm-doe.github.io/pyart/
[3] http://git.baltrad.eu/
[4] http://openradar.github.io/