Finnish Meteorological Institute Weather Radar Data with Near-Real-Time Updates

Finnish Meteorological Institute radar data becomes available less than 5 minutes after collection. This open data includes single-radar and composite products over Finland in GeoTIFF and HDF5 formats. Available parameters include radar reflectivity, rainfall intensity, precipitation accumulation, radial velocity, rain classification, and cloud top height.

Use Cases

• Short-term precipitation forecasting based on near-real-time radar reflectivity and rainfall intensity composites.
• Hydrological modeling and flood risk assessment based on 1, 12, and 24-hour precipitation accumulation data.
• Analyzing storm structure and dynamics based on single-radar parameters like radial velocity and cloud top height.
• Training machine learning models for weather prediction using the high-temporal-resolution radar volume data.

Strengths

• Data is available in near-real-time, typically updated less than 5 minutes after radar collection.
• Provides multiple data products including composites over Finland and raw volume data from single radars.
• Offers several key meteorological parameters like DBZ, RR, VRAD, HCLASS, and ETOP 20.
• Data is provided in standard, interoperable formats (GeoTIFF, HDF5) following ODIM 2.3 conventions.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and total dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Finnish Meteorological Institute

Collection Method

Collected from the FMI radar network, pre-processed, and delivered in open data formats.

Time Range

Current and ongoing; near-real-time.

Freshness

Near-real-time; data is processed and made available as soon as received, typically within 5 minutes of collection.

Geography

Finland (composite data) and locations of individual radars.