Speaker
Description
EURADCLIM is a publicly available climatological dataset of 1-h and 24-h precipitation accumulations covering 78% of geographical Europe at a 2-km grid. The current version 3 includes the period 2013 – 2023. It is based on the surface rain rate composites from the EUMETNET programme OPERA. Algorithms are applied to remove remaining non-meteorological echoes as much as possible. The 1-h accumulations are merged with rain gauge accumulations from the European Climate Assessment & Dataset (ECA&D). Details on the employed datasets and algorithms will be presented. EURADCLIM version 3 has the following improvements with respect to versions 1 & 2:
- 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 w.r.t. version 1 (and 2023 w.r.t. version 2).
The quality of EURADCLIM version 3 (https://doi.org/10.21944/1rxx-ev62) is assessed by comparisons to (independent) rain gauge data. The quality of EURADCLIM is clearly better than that of the original OPERA product. The potential of EURADCLIM for deriving a pan-European precipitation climatology is shown. EURADCLIM could serve as a reference dataset for precipitation estimates from opportunistic sensing. Version 3 of EURADCLIM is publicly available at the KNMI Data Platform in ODIM HDF5 format. Version 3 will also become publicly available at the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) in netCDF4 CF format. New versions will only become available at C3S in this format. Finally, it will be presented what can be expected from EURADCLIM version 4.