EURADCLIM: The European climatological gauge-adjusted radar precipitation dataset (24-h accumulations)

The European climatological gauge-adjusted radar precipitation dataset, EURADCLIM, addresses the need for an accurate (sub-)daily precipitation product covering 8000000 square kilometers of Europe at high spatial resolution. It consists of 1-h and 24-h precipitation accumulations (every clock-hour) at a 2-km grid for the period 2013 through 2022. It is based on the European Meteorological Network (EUMETNET) Operational Program on the Exchange of weather RAdar Information (OPERA) gridded radar dataset of 15-min instantaneous surface rain rates. For EURADCLIM, first methods have been applied to further remove non-meteorological echoes from these images by applying two statistical methods and a satellite-based cloud type mask. Second, the radar composites are merged with the rain gauge data from the European Climate Assessment & Dataset (ECA&D) in order to substantially improve its quality. We expect to rerun EURADCLIM once a year over the entire period, using all available ECA&D rain gauge data, and extend it with one year of data. This will result in a new version of this dataset. Project EURADCLIM was financed by KNMI’s multi-annual strategic research programme (project number 2017.02). The EURADCLIM dataset is based on the OPERA surface radar rain rate and daily precipitation sums of the rain gauge networks provided by the European national weather services and other data holding institutes, through ECA&D.

With respect to version 1, the changes include slightly improved removal of non-meteorological echoes, somewhat better rain gauge coverage over the years 2013 to 2020, and years 2021 and 2022 have been added to the dataset.

Usage: For each month a zip file is provided. The data are in UTC, where the time in the unzipped filenames is the end time of observation in UTC. Object "dataset1/data1" contains the 24-h precipitation accumulation in millimeters. For a given grid cell, it is equal to the "nodata" value (-9999000.0) in case data availability of the underlying 1-h accumulations is < 83.3%. Object "dataset2/dataset1" contains the number of valid values for each radar grid cell (count), i.e., the number of underlying 1-h accumulations that have been used.