arXiv:2602.15088v1 Announce Type: new
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 $1200times1400$ 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.