Data from the NIMROD system data describe rain-rate observations in Northern Europe taken by NIMROD, which is a very short range forecasting system used by the Met Office. Composite European data are available from April 2002 until present, collected by a network of rain radars at northern European stations. Radar images from the 15 C-band (5.3 cm wavelength) radars around Europe at 5 km resolution, are received by the Nimrod system at 15 minute intervals. Data products are available since April 2002, whilst image products are available from February 2003. Each file has been compressed and then stored within daily tar archive files.

The precipitation rate analysis uses processed radar and satellite data, together with surface reports and Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) fields. Europe has a network of 15 C-band rainfall radars and data form these are processed by the Met Office NIMROD system. The data files contain integer precipitation rates in unit of (mm/hr)*32. Each value is between 0 and 32767. In practice it is rare to see a value in excess of 4096 i.e. 128 mm/hr

CEDA are not able to fulfil requests for data that are missing from this archive. The data may be available at a cost by contacting the Met Office directly with required dates. It is worth contacting CEDA first to check if the reason for the gap is already identified as being due to the data not existing at all.