Radar

Overview

The DWD provides several data products produced by radar for different radar sites. Those are not further explained as of their complexity. The DWD also offers Radolan, an advanced radar product with calibrated areal precipitation, and Radvor, a precipitation forecast based on radar. Further information on radar products can be found their radar products overview.

Radolan offers the user radar precipitation measurements that are calibrated with ground based measurements. The data is offered in hourly and daily versions, both being frequently updated for the recent version and data for each concluded year is stored in the historical version. The daily version offers gliding sums of the last 24 hours while the hourly version offers hourly sums of precipitation. The precipitation amount is given in 1/10 mm.

BUFR products as DataFrame

Site products published in BUFR format (echo top, reflectivity) can optionally be parsed into a polars DataFrame. Enable the read_bufr setting and each RadarResult returned by query() will carry the parsed data on its .df attribute (a long frame with one row per grid pixel: station/grid metadata plus the pixel value, with missing pixels as null); the raw payload remains available on .data. This requires the optional eccodes and bufr dependency extras — without them, or with read_bufr disabled, .df stays None.

from wetterdienst import Settings
from wetterdienst.provider.dwd.radar import DwdRadarParameter, DwdRadarDataFormat, DwdRadarValues
from wetterdienst.provider.dwd.radar.sites import DwdRadarSite

request = DwdRadarValues(
    parameter=DwdRadarParameter.PE_ECHO_TOP,
    site=DwdRadarSite.BOO,
    fmt=DwdRadarDataFormat.BUFR,
    settings=Settings(read_bufr=True),
)
for result in request.query():
    print(result.df)