1 km Resolution UK Composite Rainfall Data from the Met Office Nimrod System

1 km resolution composite data from the Met Office's UK rainfall radars via the Met Office NIMROD system. The NIMROD system is a very short range forecasting system used by the Met Office. Data are available from 2004 until present at UK stations and detail rain-rate observations taken every 5 minutes. 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. The UK has a network of 15 C-band rainfall radars and data form these are processed by the Met Office NIMROD system.

Please note CEDA are not able to fulfil requests for missing data 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 CEDA first to check if the reason for the gap is already identified as being due to the data not existing at all.

CEDA 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.

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.

At 10:00 on 14 June 2005, the 1 km composite data files became larger with 2175 rows by 1725 columns compared to the previous 775 rows by 640 columns. From 14:55 on 30 August 2006, the 1 km composite data files are gzipped files. From 13 Nov 2007, the 1 km composite is derived directly from processed polar (600m x 1 degree) rain rate estimates and there is more detail in the rain structure.

Date (Publication): 2003-08-31T10:31:21

Date (Creation): 2003-08-31T10:31:21

Citation identifier: https://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/27dd6ffba67f667a18c62de5c3456350

Citation identifier: NCAS British Atmospheric Data Centre (NCAS BADC) / 27dd6ffba67f667a18c62de5c3456350

Point of contact

Organisation name	Electronic mail address	Role
Met Office	enquiries@metoffice.gov.uk	Author
Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA)	support@ceda.ac.uk	Custodian
Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA)	support@ceda.ac.uk	Distributor
Met Office	enquiries@metoffice.gov.uk	Principal investigator
Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA)	support@ceda.ac.uk	pointofContact
NCAS British Atmospheric Data Centre (NCAS BADC)	badc@rl.ac.uk	Publisher

Maintenance and update frequency: Continual

Update scope: Dataset

Keywords

Met Office
NIMROD
rain radar

GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0

atmospheric conditions

Access constraints: Other restrictions

Other constraints: Access to these data is available to any registered CEDA user. Please Login or Register for a CEDA account to gain access.

Use constraints: Other restrictions

Other constraints: Under the following licence http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/, appropriate use of these data may fall under any use. This message is intended as guidance, always read the full licence. When using these data you must cite them correctly using the citation given on the CEDA Data Catalogue record.

Spatial representation type: Grid

Language: English

Topic category

Climatology, meteorology, atmosphere

Begin date: 2004-04-06T00:00:00

Unique resource identifier: WGS 84

Distribution format

Name	Version
NIMROD product data are in the non-standard NIMROD binary format. Refer to linked documentation for further details. However, the documentation does not indicate there are three 4 byte elements in each record. These are located before each block of data within the record, the first and second should be equal to 512 to confirm the size of the next data block; the third should be equal to twice the size of the data grid (e.g. if the data are in a grid 200 by 500 boxes, then this third entry should be 200,000)

Name

Version

NIMROD product data are in the non-standard NIMROD binary format. Refer to linked documentation for further details. However, the documentation does not indicate there are three 4 byte elements in each record. These are located before each block of data within the record, the first and second should be equal to 512 to confirm the size of the next data block; the third should be equal to twice the size of the data grid (e.g. if the data are in a grid 200 by 500 boxes, then this third entry should be 200,000)

Distributor contact

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA)		support@ceda.ac.uk	Distributor

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
	https://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/27dd6ffba67f667a18c62de5c3456350	CEDA Data Catalogue Page

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
	http://data.ceda.ac.uk/badc/ukmo-nimrod/data/composite/uk-1km	DOWNLOAD

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
	http://data.ceda.ac.uk/badc/ukmo-nimrod/doc/1km_Radar_Composite_Product_Description.doc	Description of 1km grid network composite data product

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
	http://data.ceda.ac.uk/badc/ukmo-nimrod/doc/radar_products_description.pdf	Product description table

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
	https://artefacts.ceda.ac.uk/badc_datadocs/nimrod/calendar.html	NIMROD 1km composite data availability calendar for the period 2003-2010

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
	http://data.ceda.ac.uk/badc/ukmo-nimrod/software	Software tools for reading NIMROD .dat files.

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
	http://data.ceda.ac.uk/badc/ukmo-nimrod/doc/Nimrod_File_Format_v1.7.pdf	NIMROD file format description

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
	https://artefacts.ceda.ac.uk/badc_datadocs/nimrod/factsheet15.pdf	Met Office Weather Radar Factsheet

Hierarchy level: Dataset

Conformance result

Title: Commission Regulation (EU) No 1089/2010 of 23 November 2010 implementing Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council as regards interoperability of spatial data sets and services

Date (Publication): 2010-12-08

Statement: Data are acquired from rain radar network in the UK and Europe by the Met Office's NIMROD system. Composite products (images and data) and single site data are then sent to the BADC by the Met Office's DART operational dissemination system. Raw polar data from single sites are sent through from the RADARNET team at the Met Office. On arrival at the BADC the data are ingested after a one day quarantine.

Metadata

File identifier: 27dd6ffba67f667a18c62de5c3456350 XML

Metadata language: English

Character set: UTF8

Parent identifier: Met Office Rain Radar Data from the NIMROD System
82adec1f896af6169112d09cc1174499

Hierarchy level: Dataset

Date stamp: 2026-04-16T02:02:00

Metadata standard name: UK GEMINI

Metadata standard version: 2.3

Metadata author

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA)		support@ceda.ac.uk	Point of contact

Overviews

Spatial extent

Provided by

Access to the catalogue

Read here the full details and access to the data.

Simple

Conformance result

Metadata

Overviews

Spatial extent

Keywords

Provided by

Share on social sites