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

5 km resolution composite data and plots 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.

Date (Publication): 2003-08-31T10:31:02

Date (Creation): 2003-08-31T10:31:02

Citation identifier: https://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/f91b2c5399c5bf689e29bb15ab45da8a

Citation identifier: NCAS British Atmospheric Data Centre (NCAS BADC) / f91b2c5399c5bf689e29bb15ab45da8a

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
UK

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: 1999-06-07T00:00:00

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). 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.

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).

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.

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/f91b2c5399c5bf689e29bb15ab45da8a	CEDA Data Catalogue Page

OnLine resource

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

OnLine resource

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

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

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
	https://artefacts.ceda.ac.uk/badc_datadocs/nimrod/factsheet15.pdf	Met Office Factsheet no. 15: Weather Radar

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: f91b2c5399c5bf689e29bb15ab45da8a XML

Metadata language: English

Character set: UTF8

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

Hierarchy level: Dataset

Date stamp: 2026-03-01T03:02:00

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

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