TU Delft Micro-rain radar data - MRR005 at Slufter

<strong>Description:</strong>Vertical profiles of rainfall rates, reflectivity, Doppler spectrum, liquid water content and raindrop size distributions recorded by a micro-rain radar MRR-PRO by Metek GmbH named "MRR005" at Slufter. Slufter is a large-scale storage site for contaminated sludge in the southwestern part of the Rotterdam Maasvlakte, approximately 31 km West of the city center of Rotterdam. Along the ring dike of the Slufter, several wind turbines belong to the Windpark Slufterdam are providing electricity for the region. The MRR is placed on top of an air quality monitoring container belonging to TNO, at a height of approx. 4 meters. The rough climate conditions near the coast of the North Sea, with high winds, salt, and sand creates a very challenging environment for long-term weather observations. <br>This dataset is part of a larger collection of datasets published by the Dept. of Geoscience and Remote Sensing (GRS) at TU Delft within the framework of the Ruisdael Observatory (https://ruisdael-observatory.nl/).<br>The MRR-PRO is a 24.23 GHz FMCW radar (1.238 cm wavelength), with a beam width of 1.7° and a fixed elevation angle of 90° (i.e., vertically pointing). All micro-rain radars within the Ruisdael Observatory are operated using the same base settings: The temporal resolution of the measurements (i.e., the time of incoherent averaging) is 10 seconds ; the range resolution is 35 meters ; the number of range gates is 128 (max. range of 4480 meters) ; the number of spectrum lines is 64 ; the Doppler velocity resolution is 0.189 m/s (Nyquist velocity range of 12.09 m/s) ; the sampling rate is 500 kHz and the sweep time is 0.000512 seconds.<br><strong>List of variables:</strong>* time, latitude, longitude, altitude* rainfall rate* reflectivity and equivalent reflectivity factor* reflectivity and equivalent reflectivity factor (corrected for attenuation)* liquid water content * path-integrated rain attenuation* vertical velocity of hydrometeors* doppler spectrum width* doppler power spectrum* raindrop size distributions* melting layer flag* signal to noise ratio<br><strong>Relevance:</strong>Vertically profiling micro-rain radars provide high-resolution vertical profiles of precipitation, offering valuable insight into the structure, evolution, and intensity of rain events, from the clouds down to the surface. These observations are essential for studying the vertical distribution of rainfall microphysics, validating and improving numerical weather prediction models, and radar-based rainfall retrieval algorithms. Additionally, they contribute to better understanding of atmospheric processes such as evaporation, melting layers, and drop size distribution evolution with height, all of which are crucial for accurate quantitative precipitation estimation and modeling of radiative transfer.