What is NEXRAD?
The Next Generation Weather Radar (NEXRAD) networks 160 Doppler radar sites throughout the United States and select overseas locations detecting precipitation and atmospheric movement. Level-II data include the original three meteorological base data quantities: reflectivity, mean radial velocity, and spectrum width, as well as the dual-polarization base data of differential reflectivity, correlation coefficient, and differential phase. NEXRAD Level II data is in the .GZ binary format specific to the NEXRAD project. The archives run June 1991 to present.
Data is made available to the research community as part of the Open Common Consortium’s collaboration with NOAA. For more information visit the NOAA Nexrad site.
Why Mosaic Precipitation?
The NEXRAD data is provided in polar coordinates, which one file per volume per radar. Frequently users of this data wish to have rainfall rates or accumulations on a regular cartesian grid for ease of use. This product provides that featureset.
Data Updates
The mosaic products are available from 2001-2011 as a reanalysis. Real time data is made available from NCEI at http://mrms.ncep.noaa.gov/data/. A recent archive of MRMS data is available from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet at https://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/nws/.
Precipitation Rate Reanalysis
The mosaic precipitation reanalysis is provided in grib2 files every 5 minutes from 2001 through 2011. Tar files are provided which contain the 5 minute grib2 files for every year in this time span.
- MRMS_PrecipRate_2001.tar
- MRMS_PrecipRate_2002.tar
- MRMS_PrecipRate_2003.tar
- MRMS_PrecipRate_2004.tar
- MRMS_PrecipRate_2005.tar
- MRMS_PrecipRate_2006.tar
- MRMS_PrecipRate_2007.tar
- MRMS_PrecipRate_2008.tar
- MRMS_PrecipRate_2009.tar
- MRMS_PrecipRate_2010.tar
- MRMS_PrecipRate_2011.tar
Citation
Dr. Jian Zhang And Dr. Jonathan Gourley. (2018). Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor Precipitation Reanalysis (Version 1.0). Open Commons Consortium Environmental Data Commons. https://doi.org/10.25638/EDC.PRECIP.0001