Apply rain cell tracking to 20 years of rain radar data over Germany

So, I downloaded the 20-year radar data set (Mar to Nov) from the German meteorological service (DWD). It contains about 1.5 million individual radar-derived precipitation fields – one every 5 minutes. And, I was very excited to run a rain cell tracking on it. After handing in my PhD thesis, I was going for a short trip to visit family and friends in Germany. Fortunately, I have a home server and I decided to let it do the heavy work while I am on holidays. It took the full ten days of my absence plus two extra days for the 8-core Intel CPU machine to process all data. So, let’s see how I did it.

This post is part of the germanRADARanalysis project.

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Download German rain radar data and convert it to NetCDF (or what they should provide in the first place)

For a private project, I wanted to have a look at the German radar archive. I found that they have quasi-calibrated 5-minute precipitation data on a 1km2 grid available in the public domain. So, let’s download and process the data set, so that it is easier to use for further data analysis.

This post is part of the germanRADARanalysis project. All code is available on GitHub.

Continue reading “Download German rain radar data and convert it to NetCDF (or what they should provide in the first place)”