Operational Radar Network

Overview

This collection contains a long-term archive of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology operational weather network data. These observations are collected from sites across Australia for a period of more than twenty years and provide 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 Eumetnet ODIMH5 model of the HDF5 format. Level 1b consists of corrected and calibrated 3D gridded data and volumetric in 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. The Historical Ground Reflectivity dataset extends the Rainfield 3 dataset back to 1997. Both Rainfields 3 and Historical Ground Reflectivity datasets are provided in a Cartesian gridded netCDF4 files and includes the best practice corrections for issues which impact weather radar data.

Note: Level 2 Rain Rate products are no longer updated. Please use the Historical Ground Reflectivity dataset.

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. Historical Ground Reflectivity is not updated.

• Licensed: Level 1 is licenced under CC4-BY. Level 1b, 2, Rainfields 3 and Historical Ground Reflectivity 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/DTTK-H476

Historical Ground Reflectivity: Soderholm J., Pudashine J., Curtis M., Australian Operational Weather Radar Historical Ground Reflectivity Dataset. electronics dataset, National Computing Infrastructure, doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.25914/tt34-0b43

Example Data Availability Statement: SHI data is available from the AURA level 2 dataset on NCI under a CC4-BY-NC licence from https://dx.doi.org/10.25914/JJWZ-0F13

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