TAASRAD19, a high-resolution weather radar reflectivity dataset for precipitation nowcasting

Gabriele Franch, Valerio Maggio, Luca Coviello, Marta Pendesini, Giuseppe Jurman, Cesare Furlanello*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticle (Academic Journal)peer-review

21 Citations (Scopus)
206 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

We introduce TAASRAD19, a high-resolution radar reflectivity dataset collected by the Civil Protection weather radar of the Trentino South Tyrol Region, in the Italian Alps. The dataset includes 894,916 timesteps of precipitation from more than 9 years of data, offering a novel resource to develop and benchmark analog ensemble models and machine learning solutions for precipitation nowcasting. Data are expressed as 2D images, considering the maximum reflectivity on the vertical section at 5 min sampling rate, covering an area of 240 km of diameter at 500 m horizontal resolution. The TAASRAD19 distribution also includes a curated set of 1,732 sequences, for a total of 362,233 radar images, labeled with precipitation type tags assigned by expert meteorologists. We validate TAASRAD19 as a benchmark for nowcasting methods by introducing a TrajGRU deep learning model to forecast reflectivity, and a procedure based on the UMAP dimensionality reduction algorithm for interactive exploration. Software methods for data pre-processing, model training and inference, and a pre-trained model are publicly available on GitHub (https://github.com/MPBA/TAASRAD19) for study replication and reproducibility.
Original languageEnglish
Article number234 (2020)
Number of pages13
JournalScientific Data
Volume7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 13 Jul 2020

Keywords

  • Atmospheric dynamics
  • ` Computational science

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