5 km Resolution Europe Composite Resolution Rainfall Data from the Met Office Nimrod System

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.

Date (Publication): 2003-08-31T10:29:57

Date (Creation): 2003-08-31T10:29:57

Citation identifier: https://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/d5ae8b92d8c884690592ce619f2eca07

Citation identifier: NCAS British Atmospheric Data Centre (NCAS BADC) / d5ae8b92d8c884690592ce619f2eca07

Point of contact

Organisation name	Electronic mail address	Role
Met Office	enquiries@metoffice.gov.uk	Author
NCAS British Atmospheric Data Centre (NCAS BADC)	badc@rl.ac.uk	Custodian
NCAS British Atmospheric Data Centre (NCAS BADC)	badc@rl.ac.uk	Distributor
Met Office	enquiries@metoffice.gov.uk	Principal investigator
NCAS British Atmospheric Data Centre (NCAS BADC)	badc@rl.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: These data have multiple licences for different applications. Always make sure to read the appropriate licence for full data usage limitations details. Other usage may not be permitted. Restricted data: please submit an application using the REQUEST ACCESS link for access.

Use constraints: Other restrictions

Other constraints: Under the following licence https://artefacts.ceda.ac.uk/licences/specific_licences/ukmo_agreement.pdf, appropriate use of these data may fall under academic 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.

Other constraints: Under the following licence https://artefacts.ceda.ac.uk/licences/specific_licences/ukmo_agreement_gov.pdf, appropriate use of these data may fall under policy 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: 2002-04-20T00:00:00

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. 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 data software directory (see documentation links). 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. 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 data software directory (see documentation links).

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
NCAS British Atmospheric Data Centre (NCAS BADC)		badc@rl.ac.uk	Distributor

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
	https://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/d5ae8b92d8c884690592ce619f2eca07	CEDA Data Catalogue Page

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
	http://data.ceda.ac.uk/badc/ukmo-nimrod/data/composite/europe-5km	DOWNLOAD

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
	http://data.ceda.ac.uk/badc/ukmo-nimrod/software	dataset software directory

OnLine resource

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

OnLine resource

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

OnLine resource

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

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: d5ae8b92d8c884690592ce619f2eca07 XML

Metadata language: English

Character set: UTF8

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

Hierarchy level: Dataset

Date stamp: 2026-01-15T03:01:48

Metadata standard name: UK GEMINI

Metadata standard version: 2.3

Metadata author

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
NCAS British Atmospheric Data Centre (NCAS BADC)		badc@rl.ac.uk	Point of contact

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