A collection of products from rain radars operated by the Met Office and other European agencies for the UK and Europe. This collection includes rain composite plots and data for the UK and Europe, plus single site radar data including rain rate data, single and dual-polar data products.

These were produced by the Met Office's Nimrod system. Nimrod is a fully automated system for weather analysis and nowcasting based around a network of C-band rainfall radars. This dataset has the fine-resolution analyses of rain rate for the UK and Europe.

The UK has a network of C-band rainfall radars and data form these are processed by the Met Office NIMROD system. Four or five radar scans at different elevations at each site are processed to give the best possible estimate of rainfall at the ground. The main quality checking method is routine evaluation using rain gauges as ground truth.

The BADC holds the analyses of rainfall rate at a time resolution of 5 or 15 minutes. Data are available from late 2002. Images are available for the UK as well as a further image including neighbouring European countries from 1999. Data files are available on a 1 km and 5 km Cartesian grid. Single radar site data are available for 2 and 5 km Cartesian grids for various UK radar sites.

The value of radar-based data from the Nimrod system has been highlighted repeatedly. For example, in two severe flooding events during 1998 (at Easter over the Midlands and in late October over Wales), estimates of surface rainfall derived from radar data provided evidence of the extent and severity of the rainfall events. The 2 km data files reach to 100 km from the radar, the 5km files to 250 km.

Detailed radar site location are given in the Met Office Weather Radar Factsheet.

Time resolution is 5 or 15 minutes depending on the product.

Various scripts have been made available under the software directory to aid use of these data, including within GIS applications.