The Met Office UK rainfall data from the NIMROD system data describe rain-rate observations taken by NIMROD, which is a very short range forecasting system used by the Met Office. Data were collected from 2002 until present at UK stations.

The precipitation rate analysis uses processed radar and satellite data, together with surface reports and Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) fields. The UK has a network of 15 C-band rainfall radars and data form these are processed by the Met Office NIMROD system.

Radar images from the 15 C-band (5.3 cm wavelength) radars around the British Isles, at 5 km and 2 km resolution, are received by the Nimrod system at 15 minute and 5 minute intervals respectively.

The Met Office wish to monitor the use of these analyses and require an acknowledgement of the data source if they are used in any publication.

The online application for access to the Met Office Nimrod data includes acceptance of the Met Office Conditions of Use. Please note that the Met Office data sets are available for bona fide academic research only, on a per person per project basis (i.e. all members on a same project who will be using the data must individually apply for access to the data). If you wish to access the Met Office data for commercial or personal purposes, please contact the Met Office directly.

Once your application has been processed you can access the data via the web

The NIMROD data is routinely and continuously updated at the BADC to present date.

A calendar detailing data availability for the period 2003-2010 is also available from here

The current situation is that we 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 the BADC first to check if the reason for the gap is already identified as being due to the data not existing at all.

The BADC does not support reading software but programs written by the community to do this task in IDL, Matlab, FORTRAN and Python are available in the dataset software directory. Those interested in importing to ArcGIS should see the Lancaster ArcGIS page.

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.

The raw polar data format is described in the polar data header format document. The actual elevations of individual scans are recorded in the polar data files. The file names for the polar data follow the BADC file name convention but those for the normal data products do not.

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

If you have queries about these pages or about obtaining the Met Office Land Surface data from the BADC then you should contact CEDA Support. Your query should be answered within one working day. When follow-up work is required, the CEDA support will carry out the work as quickly and efficiently as possible, and in any case, the user will be kept informed of progress.