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

TL;DR

This paper introduces IT-DPC-SRI, a comprehensive, cloud-optimized archive of Italian radar precipitation data from 2010 to 2025, addressing data fragmentation and enabling accessible long-term climate and weather analysis.

Contribution

It provides the first unified, analysis-ready, long-term archive of Italian radar precipitation data, harmonized into a cloud-optimized format for broad accessibility.

Findings

Over 1 million timesteps of data available

Compressed from 7TB to 51GB on disk

Accessible via multiple cloud platforms

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.