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2021— Proof of concept

LAMULA — vendor-independent weather radar chain

The full processing chain of a commercial weather radar, rebuilt from the FPGA digital receiver to the WebGL product viewer.

LAMULA WebViewer showing base reflectivity from the KEOX radar: a large precipitation system over the Gulf coast of Alabama, Georgia and Florida, with a dBZ colour scale and surface wind barbs.
The last stage of the chain, the WebViewer. KEOX, base reflectivity (N0B), VCP 212, elevation 0.5° — 9 October 2026, 21:53 GMT−4. NEXRAD Level III decoded, regridded and rendered by the stages described above. Basemap © OpenStreetMap contributors.
The same viewer showing radial velocity: a red lobe north-west of the radar and a green one south-east of it, on a colour scale running from −111 to 111 km/h, ringed by a purple arc labelled range folded. Storm cell identifiers, wind barbs and a volume timeline run along the bottom of the window.
The same storm nineteen minutes earlier, in radial velocity: EOX, 21:34:43 GMT−4 on 9 October 2026, VCP 212, elevation 0.5°. Green is motion toward the radar, red away from it. The purple arc is data the radar could not place unambiguously in range — the viewer labels it RF rather than drawing it as weather, which is the whole reason the decoder is ours. Reflectivity says where the precipitation is; velocity says what it is doing.

The problem. A weather radar whose control and processing software is a closed vendor suite is a radar you cannot maintain, extend or repair on your own terms. Spare parts and licences become a single point of failure for a national observation asset.

The constraint that is not negotiable. The meteorological data must stay standard. Rebuilding the chain is worthless if the output stops being readable by the tools and archives the field already uses.

The decision. Emulate the interface instead of licensing it. The control processor archives volume observations as NEXRAD Level-II and presents itself to ORPG as a WSR-88D RDA by implementing ICD 2620002 in full. The standard becomes the seam: everything behind it is ours, everything in front of it is unchanged.

Where it stands. Open source, and today a proof of concept — not a system in operation. It descends from Vesta, the processing suite the team built at the Cuban meteorological service, which has run that network since 2014, a Gematronik radar among them. Parts of this chain start from Vesta code that was not all mine, and finishing it needs the whole team, not just me.

What the design bought. A hardware abstraction layer with two interchangeable adapters — the real plant over Modbus TCP / Profibus, and a faithful simulator — so control logic is developed and tested without occupying the radar. Hard real-time stays in the FPGA and DSP; the orchestration layer is soft real-time Python and does not pretend otherwise.

Live demo → Source → Docs →