dipr

Converts the National Weather Service's (NWS) Digital Instantaneous Precipitation Rate (DIPR) radar product from its native data format into more common vector GIS formats. The two supported target formats are Shapefile and GeoJSON.

Usage

This crate provides a command line tool called dipr that parses DIPR files and either prints information about them or converts them into Shapefile or GeoJSON. dipr is also available as a library. See the docs.

1. Download data from here. You'll need to know the station code for the radar you're interested in. The file called sn.last is the most recent scan. The scan files are updated in a circular fashion.
2. Follow the help text generated with cargo run --release -- -h. The three possible subcommands are info, to-geojson, and to-shapefile. Help text is available for each subcommand.
3. After converting the radar data to one of the supported target formats, use other GIS tools to view or process it. For example, you can rasterize the resulting GeoJSON data with something like:

gdal_rasterize \
   -l foo \
   -a precipRate \
   -ts 1920 1080 \
   -a_nodata 0.0 \
   -ot Float32 \
   -of GTiff \
   foo.geojson foo.tif > /dev/null

License

Copyright 2021-2025 Bradley Gannon

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.