EURADCLIM: The European climatological gauge-adjusted radar precipitation dataset (1-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 2023. 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.

EURADCLIM version 3 changes with respect to version 1:

• 15-min rain rates over 150 mm/h are deemed outliers and set to 0 mm/h.
• More local weighting is applied in the merging of radar and rain gauge data: the first adjustment step (only long range component) stayed the same with respect to EURADCLIM versions 1 & 2, but the second adjustment step is now more local.
• The 1-h EURADCLIM accumulations, from which the 24-h accumulations are derived, are capped at 300 mm.
• Much better rain gauge coverage above Spain.
• Years 2021, 2022, 2023 have been added (and 2023 w.r.t. version 2).

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 1-h precipitation accumulation in millimeters. For each grid cell, the availability for 1-h accumulations data is either no data or full availability, and can be determined from "dataset1/data1" through the "nodata" value (-9999000.0).