Operational Radar Network

Overview

This collection contains a long-term archive of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology operational weather network data and gridded products. These observations are collected from numerous sites across Australia for a period spanning more than twenty years and provides an invaluable understanding of precipitation and severe weather, including tropical cyclones and thunderstorms. Level 1 data is unprocessed, ungridded (spherical coordinates) and provided using the ODIM model of the HDF5 format to support the development of derived products. Level 1b consists of corrected and calibrated 3D gridded data and volumetric in the netCDF4 format. Level 2 data provides 2D grids of retrievals in netCDF4. The Rainfields 3 dataset is used operationally in Australia for QPE applications and therefore is a powerful dataset when accurate estimates of rain rate are required from radar. This dataset is provided in a Cartesian gridded netCDF4 files and includes the best practice corrections for issues which impact weather radar data.

Data provided by this portal is:

• Operational: Only weather radar data from national network is hosted

• Updated: Level 1 and Rainfields 3 datasets are updated regularly. Level 1b and 2 are updated infrequently.

• Licensed: Level 1 is licenced under CC4-BY. Level 1b, 2 and Rainfields 3 are licenced under CC4-BY-NC. See licence document in the root directory of each dataset.

Citing these Datasets:

Level 1: Soderholm J., A. Protat, C. Jakob, 2019: Australian Operational Weather Radar Level 1 Dataset. electronic dataset, National Computing Infrastructure, doi: 10.25914/508X-9A12

Level 1b: Soderholm J., V. Louf, J. Brook, A. Protat, 2022: Australian Operational Weather Radar Level 1b Dataset. electronic dataset, National Computing Infrastructure, doi: 10.25914/40KE-NM05

Level 2: Soderholm J., V. Louf, J. Brook, A. Protat, R. Warren, 2022: Australian Operational Weather Radar Level 2 Dataset. electronic dataset, National Computing Infrastructure, doi: 10.25914/JJWZ-0F13

Rainfields 3: Seed A., M. Curtis, C. Velasco, Australian Operational Weather Radar Rainfields 3 Dataset. electronic dataset, National Computing Infrastructure, doi: 10.25914/JJWZ-0F13

This project was undertaken with the assistance of resources and services from Monash University, the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), Australian Bureau of Meteorology.