Italian radar network dataset for precipitation nowcasting benchmark

This dataset accompanies the manuscript by Annella et al., "A strategy to set up test dataset and evaluation benchmark for radar nowcasting of precipitation in Italy", IEEE JSTAR, DOI: 10.1109/JSTARS.2025.3568185, 2025. The dataset includes 111955 radar frames, collected by the Italian radar network (currently composed of 20 C-band and 6 X-band systems) from February 2022 to January 2024. The dataset consists of Surface Rainfall Intensity adjusted with rain gauges (SRIadj) maps expressed in (mm/h), regularly gridded with a horizontal spacing of 1x1 km2 and time sampling of 5 min. Each radar frame is stored in a HDF5 file, which is named as day-month-year-hour-minute. Each HDF5 file contains a matrix of size 1400 by 1200 pixels on a Cartesian grid obtained using a Cartesian Mercator projection. Radar frames are stored in .zip folders named as year-month, containing the HDF5 files that fall in a given month and year. The dataset undergone a screening step so that it contains only radar maps that show spatially organized precipitation patterns inside each frame (details can be found on the companion paper).