CHIRPS
Free
Gauge-blended satellite rainfall at 0.05°, daily, since 1981 — the standard for drainage work in data-sparse regions.
NOAA Weather and Climate Toolkit
StableFree viewer and exporter for NEXRAD radar, satellite and climate data — out to GeoTIFF, Shapefile and NetCDF.
by NOAA NCEI
- Pricing
- Gov-Public
- License
- US Government (public domain)
- Commercial use
- Permitted
- Ecosystem
- Java
- Platform
- Windows, macOS, Linux
About NOAA Weather and Climate Toolkit
NOAA's Weather and Climate Toolkit (WCT) opens the archives most engineers otherwise bounce off: NEXRAD radar volumes, satellite imagery and gridded climate data, in a free Java desktop viewer that exports to the formats GIS and models actually consume — GeoTIFF, Shapefile, NetCDF, KMZ — with animation and batch export via scripting.
For storm reconstructions, radar-rainfall snapshots of a flood event, or pulling archived reflectivity into QGIS, WCT is the shortest path from NOAA's archive to your project folder. For deeper programmatic radar processing, wradlib and Py-ART pick up where its viewer scope ends.
Where it fits in the workflow
TerrainCatchmentRainfallRunoffRoutingHydraulicsMappingReporting
Appears in collections
- Design Rainfall & IDF Toolkit
Getting defensible design storms: IDF sources, rainfall statistics and climate adjustment.
Alternatives to NOAA Weather and Climate Toolkit
Ranked by the topics, categories and workflow stages they share with NOAA Weather and Climate Toolkit.
GPM IMERG
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NASA's 30-minute, 0.1° global precipitation record — the highest time resolution of any satellite rainfall product.
PERSIANN-CDR
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A neural-network satellite rainfall climate data record, daily, 0.25°, purpose-built for long-term trend studies.
wradlib
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The open library for weather-radar rainfall processing — from raw volumes to engineering-ready rainfall fields.
ARR Data Hub
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The official portal for Australian Rainfall & Runoff design inputs — losses, temporal patterns and preburst.
Caravan
Open Source
The open global large-sample hydrology dataset — thousands of catchments with forcing, attributes and streamflow.