IT-DPC-SRI: A Cloud-Optimized Archive of Italian Radar Precipitation (2010-2025)

2026-02-16

AI Summary

This study addresses the long-standing fragmentation, heterogeneous formats, and lack of a unified, accessible archive for Italian weather radar precipitation data. To resolve this, we integrate national radar data from Italy’s Civil Protection Department spanning 2010–2025 and construct the first publicly available, analysis-ready, cloud-optimized precipitation intensity data cube with high spatiotemporal resolution. Through spatial alignment and standardization, we unify 16 years of nationwide radar observations into a consistent format and encode the dataset in Zarr as an Analysis-Ready Cloud-Optimized (ARCO) product, achieving a compression ratio of 137:1 (from 7 TB to 51 GB). The resulting dataset comprises over one million time steps at 1 km spatial resolution and 5–15 minute temporal frequency, and is openly accessible via Zenodo, the ECMWF cloud platform, and ArcoDataHub, filling a critical gap in European radar-based precipitation records.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Time-Series/Data Streams
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Data Compression
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Data management and stream processing for Web, mobile and wireless applications
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data integration and cleaning
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web

Abstract

We present IT-DPC-SRI, the first publicly available long-term archive of Italian weather radar precipitation estimates, spanning 16 years (2010--2025). The dataset contains Surface Rainfall Intensity (SRI) observations from the Italian Civil Protection Department's national radar mosaic, harmonized into a coherent Analysis-Ready Cloud-Optimized (ARCO) Zarr datacube. The archive comprises over one million timesteps at temporal resolutions from 15 to 5 minutes, covering a $1200\times1400$ kilometer domain at 1 kilometer spatial resolution, compressed from 7TB to 51GB on disk. We address the historical fragmentation of Italian radar data - previously scattered across heterogeneous formats (OPERA BUFR, HDF5, GeoTIFF) with varying spatial domains and projections - by reprocessing the entire record into a unified store. The dataset is accessible as a static versioned snapshot on Zenodo, via cloud-native access on the ECMWF European Weather Cloud, and as a continuously updated live version on the ArcoDataHub platform. This release fills a significant gap in European radar data availability, as Italy does not participate in the EUMETNET OPERA pan-European radar composite. The dataset is released under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

Problem

• radar precipitation
• data fragmentation
• heterogeneous formats
• spatial projection
• long-term archive

Innovation

• cloud-optimized datacube
• radar precipitation archive
• Zarr format
• data harmonization
• ARCO (Analysis-Ready Cloud-Optimized)