Overview

The Rainfields 3 dataset is used operationally in Australia for QPE applications and therefore is a powerful dataset when accurate estimates of rain rate are required from radar. The Historical Ground Reflectivity dataset extends the Rainfield 3 dataset back to 1997. Both Rainfields 3 and Historical Ground Reflectivity datasets are provided in a Cartesian gridded netCDF4 files and includes the best practice corrections for issues which impact weather radar data.

Data provided by this portal is:

  • Operational: Only weather radar data from national network is hosted

  • Updated: Rainfields 3 datasets are updated regularly.  Historical Ground Reflectivity is not updated.

  • Licensed: Rainfields 3 and Historical Ground Reflectivity are licenced under CC BY-NC 4.0. See licence document in the root directory of each dataset.

Citing these Datasets:

  • Rainfields 3:  Seed A., M. Curtis, C. Velasco, Australian Operational Weather Radar Rainfields 3 Dataset. electronic dataset, National Computing Infrastructure, doi: 10.25914/DTTK-H476
  • Historical Ground Reflectivity: Soderholm J., Pudashine J., Curtis M., Australian Operational Weather Radar Historical Ground Reflectivity Dataset. electronics dataset, National Computing Infrastructure, doi: 10.25914/TT34-0B43

Example Data Availability Statement: Ground reflectivity data is available from the AURA Historical Ground Reflectivity dataset on NCI under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license from 10.25914/TT34-0B43

This project was undertaken with the assistance of resources and services from Monash University, National Environmental Science Program, the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) and the Bureau of Meteorology.

© Bureau of Meteorology 2025

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