This is a project which is currently making use of HPC facilities at Newcastle University. It is active.
For further information about this project, please contact:
This project supports research within the Climate+ Co-Centre to develop and analyse high-resolution precipitation datasets for the islands of Great Britain and Ireland. The work focuses on the development of hourly (or sub-hourly) gridded rainfall datasets by blending quality-controlled radar, rain gauge, and satellite observations.
The project will evaluate the resulting dataset against existing precipitation products and reanalysis datasets to assess data quality, uncertainty, and spatial variability. The research will also investigate temporal patterns and trends in rainfall variability and extreme precipitation events across the UK and Ireland, supporting improved understanding of hydrological and climate processes.
The project involves large-scale data processing and analysis using scientific computing workflows implemented primarily in Python. Processing tasks include radar rainfall quality control, spatial interpolation, dataset blending, statistical analysis, and visualization of large gridded precipitation datasets.
Typical workflows involve handling multi-year NetCDF datasets and geospatial data using libraries such as xarray, numpy, pandas, scipy, matplotlib, geopandas, and rioxarray. The work also involves comparison with existing datasets such as IMERG, ERA5, and other regional precipitation products.
HPC resources are required for parallel processing of large datasets, batch analysis workflows, and memory-intensive statistical computations.