Adapt

Real-time detection, projection, and tracking of convective storms in weather radar data, built to support adaptive radar scanning at the DOE ARM User Facility.

Note. Adapt is under active development. External pull requests are not being accepted at this time; contribution guidelines will follow the first stable release. APIs, configuration files, database schemas, and output formats are subject to change without notice.

Documentation: arm-doe.github.io/Adapt — Installation · User Guide · CLI Reference

Overview

Adapt is a modular framework for real-time convective cell detection, motion projection, and storm lifecycle analysis. It processes a stream of radar volume scans and, for each cell, produces a tracked identity, a set of measured properties, and a record of lifecycle events — initiation, growth, splitting, merging, and decay. Results are written to a structured, queryable repository (NetCDF, Parquet, and SQLite) exposed through a read-only Python API, rather than as loose output files.

The processing pipeline is composed of independently registered modules — ingest, detection, projection, analysis, and tracking — assembled automatically at run time. New algorithms and data sources are added by registering a module, not by modifying the pipeline. Every run is deterministic and reproducible: runs are registered, derived quantities are traceable to their inputs, and identical inputs produce identical tracks.

Motivation

Adapt is developed to support adaptive scanning at the U.S. Department of Energy's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) User Facility, where the C-Band Scanning ARM Precipitation Radar (CSAPR2) requires a real-time source of high-value scan targets, identified and prioritized automatically rather than by a fixed volume-scan schedule. The same pipeline runs unchanged on historical data, supporting research applications such as storm lifecycle studies, radar–lightning correlation analysis, and the construction of analysis-ready, multi-sensor datasets combining radar, satellite, and Lightning Mapping Array observations.

Current status

Adapt is at an alpha stage of development.

• The reference NEXRAD pipeline (ingest, detection, projection, analysis, tracking) runs end to end in real-time and historical modes.
• A read-only query API and GUI dashboard provide access to pipeline output.
• Post-processing modules enrich completed storm tracks with observations from other instruments.
• Rule-based target selection for adaptive scanning is under active development.
• Supported platforms: macOS, Linux, and Windows. See Installation.

No backward compatibility is guaranteed for APIs, configuration, or generated data products until the first stable release.

Roadmap

Planned work extends Adapt toward a general, multi-sensor storm-analysis framework: pluggable tracking and segmentation backends, a data-agnostic variable layer so new instruments are a configuration change rather than a code change, and integration with ARM radar-control systems to close the loop between detection and adaptive scanning. See Vision for details.

Funding

Adapt is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy as part of the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) User Facility, within the Office of Science.

License

Copyright © 2026, UChicago Argonne, LLC. See LICENSE for terms and disclaimer.