Australian radar data is open

[bart1]

Potentially it can be accessed here if we would like to include it in the package

[PietrH]

• Level 1 data is unprocessed, ungridded (spherical coordinates) and provided using the Eumetnet ODIMH5 model of the HDF5 format.
• Level 1b consists of corrected and calibrated 3D gridded data and volumetric in netCDF4 format.
• Level 2 data provides 2D grids of retrievals in netCDF4.
• 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.

We want to fetch Level 1 data only, correct?

[bart1]

I guess as that are polar volumes we could process

[bart1]

The challenge is that the data are provided in daily zip's (e.g. https://thredds.nci.org.au/thredds/catalog/rq0/2/2025/vol/catalog.html?dataset=rq0/2/2025/vol/2_20250514.pvol.zip ). I'm not sure how we can best implement this in the package without downloading the full zip file to only extract one pvol. We would need to discuss how this best fits in our interface of get_pvol which is shaped around accessing one file/timestamp.

Checking out one pvol file it reads without an issue and contains attributes of interest:

> read_pvolfile("/home/bart/Downloads/2_20250514_230000.pvol.h5", param="all")$scans[[1]]
                  Polar scan (class scan)

     parameters:  DBZH SNRH DBZH_CLEAN VRADDH VRADH WRADH TH ZDR RHOHV PHIDP PHIDP2 KDP 
elevation angle:  0.5 deg
           dims:  1283 bins x 360 rays