DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14617083
title: SPHERA High Resolution Reanalysis over Italy - Hourly accumulated total precipitation

description: Please refer to the latest-released version (v2) of this dataset

SPHERA (High Resolution REAnalysis over Italy) is a convection-permitting regional reanalysis developed by ARPAE-Emilia Romagna and publicly available. The SPHERA domain covers Italy and the surrounding seas with a horizontal resolution of 2.2km. The temporal coverage corresponds to the period 1995-2020 and the dataset is available at a hourly frequency. SPHERA reanalysis was developed using the Numerical Weather Prediction model COSMO (www.cosmo-model.org) nested in the global reanalysis ERA5 produced by ECMWF. Moreover, upper-air and surface observations were assimilated at the convection-permitting scale by the COSMO nudging scheme.

This record reports the hourly accumulated total precipitation for the period 1995-2020.

Update 09/10/2025: tpH Dataset Version 2 Released:

A new version of the dataset (v2) has been published, incorporating the following improvements and corrections:



Precipitation data have been cleaned to remove duplicated fields that were inadvertently included in the initial release. Additionally, the data have been decumulated to represent hourly precipitation values. In the original version, precipitation was reported as accumulations increasing over the day from 00 UTC to 23 UTC.This format has now been replaced by actual hourly precipitation totals, offering a representation that is more relevant and useful for most applications.

Grid inconsistencies present in some GRIB messages have been resolved to ensure structural uniformity across the dataset.

Data have been rescued for some of the data holes. In the cases when only 1 hour was missing from the original extraction, the field has been produced by averaging the two fields associated with the previous and next hours to ensure the most continuous data series as possible. Particularly this is the case for the following grib messages:



23 UTC of 31 December 1995

23 UTC of 31 December 1998

23 UTC of 19 February 2020

23 UTC of 13-17-22-30 July 2020

23 UTC of 4-14 August 2020




Other fields currently available on Zenodo are the surface relative humidity at 2-meter height (over three different records due to space constraints):



1995-2003: https://zenodo.org/uploads/12724026

2004-2012: https://zenodo.org/uploads/12724104

2013-2020: https://zenodo.org/uploads/12724140


and the hourly surface air temperature at 2-meter height:



1995-2003: https://zenodo.org/records/12567563

2004-2012: https://zenodo.org/records/12582246

2013-2020: https://zenodo.org/records/12582797


Details on the SPHERA dataset production, as well as data verification against surface observations are reported in peer-reviewed publications. See References.
description: This record reports the hourly accumulated total precipitation for the period 1995-2020. Data are aggregated on yearly files. Files are in GRIB2 format. Grid is a rotated latitude/longitude grid, which is the original production grid. 
description: Missing hours:



22 and 23 UTC of 1 July 1999

08 and 09 UTC of 12 April 2008

00, 01, 02 and 03 UTC of 26 August 2011

00, 01, 02, 03, 04 and 05 UTC of 11 November 2011

23 UTC of 31 December 2020