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

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

A 16-year archive of Surface Rainfall Intensity (SRI) estimates from the Italian Civil Protection Department (DPC) national weather radar mosaic, harmonized into a single Analysis-Ready Cloud-Optimized (ARCO) Zarr store.

Contents

• Variable: precipitation rate (mm/h), stored as float32
• Time range: 2010-01-01 to 2025-12-31 (1,039,785 timesteps; 98.5% complete)
• Temporal resolution: 15 min (2010–2014), 10 min (2014–2020), 5 min (2020–2025)
• Spatial domain: 1400 × 1200 grid at 1 km resolution (~1400 × 1200 km), Transverse Mercator projection centered on Italy (42°N, 12.5°E)
• Zarr size on disk: 51 GB
• Uncompressed data volume: 7.0 TB
• Format: Zarr v2

Quick start

import xarray as xr
ds = xr.open_zarr("path/to/italian-radar-dpc-sri.zarr/")

The dataset is also available for cloud-native access (no download required) via the mlcast-datasets Python package on the ECMWF European Weather Cloud, and as a continuously updated live version on ArcoDataHub. See the accompanying paper for details.

Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite both the dataset and the accompanying paper:

Franch, G., Tomasi, E., Azhel, U., Tomezzoli, G., Camilletti, A., Poli, V., Pelosini, R., Vulpiani, G., Scipione, G., Trotta, G. and Angelinelli, M., 2026. IT-DPC-SRI: A Cloud-Optimized Archive of Italian Radar Precipitation (2010-2025). arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.15088. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.15088

License

CC BY-SA 4.0. Original radar data: © Dipartimento della Protezione Civile. Processing and harmonization: Fondazione Bruno Kessler.