The EURADCLIM gauge-adjusted radar precipitation dataset version 4

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 newest version will contain data from the period 2013 – 2024. It is based on the surface rain rate composites from the EUMETNET programme OPERA. Non-meteorological echoes result in precipitation overestimation and are further removed by employing statistical methods but also using a satellite cloud type product. The 1-h accumulations are combined with rain gauge accumulations from the European Climate Assessment & Dataset (ECA&D). EURADCLIM is currently available at the KNMI Data Platform in ODIM HDF5 format but will become available at the Copernicus Climate Data Store in netCDF4 CF-1.8 format.

 

An overview of the employed input datasets and applied processing will be presented, as well as changes in processing for versions 3 and 4 with respect to previous versions. The performance of EURADCLIM precipitation accumulations is evaluated by comparisons to (independent) rain gauge data. This also entails a spatial evaluation, scatter density plots, and an evaluation of extremes. Specific attention will be given to outliers. The quality of EURADCLIM is clearly better than that of the original OPERA product. It is shown that EURADCLIM can be used to derive a pan-European precipitation climatology. Hence, EURADCLIM fills a gap by providing hourly precipitation accumulations, with a much higher spatial resolution and coverage than interpolated pan-European rain gauge datasets, which typically provide daily accumulations. This can be beneficial, for instance, for evaluating satellite precipitation products or weather model output, but also for better evaluation of extreme precipitation events and their impact (e.g., landslides, flooding).