System acrynom - National Hydrological Service Practitioners Guide

Regional Deterministic Precipitation Analysis System (CaPA-RDPA)

Overview

CaPA-RDPA is a regional deterministic precipitation analysis system that provides objective estimates of precipitation amount over the North American domain by merging records from precipitation sensors, radar QPEs, IMERG QPEs and a trial field generated from a numerical weather prediction system (RDRS).

Current version: 5.2.0
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What is the spatial resolution and coverage of this data?

RDPA covers continental North America, and has a spatial resolution of 10-km.

What is available?

What is the timestep and time period covered by this data?

HRDPA produces four sets of cumulative precipitation analyses (6-hour amounts per day) valid at synoptic hours (00, 06, 12, and 18Z) each day. HRDPA also produces two 24-hour precipitation amounts in step with the climatological day valid at 06 and 12 UTC.

A 'preliminary' analysis is completed 1 hour after the time of validity and another called 'final' is produced 7 hours later, which results in a total of 8 analyses for a day.

What are the outputs from this product?

Outputs currently available

Variable	Variable long name	Unit	Level	Frequency
PR	Total precipitation	kg/m2	surface	6h/24hr
CFIA	Confidence Index of the Analysis	-	-	6h

The field CFIA gives the weight of observations in the analysis value at grid points. Its value falls in a range from 0 to 1. A value of 0 means that no observation has contributed to the value of the analysis, while a value close to 1 means that the weight of neighboring observations is high. More confidence is placed on the analysis value where CFIA is high.

How do I access the data?

There are multiple ways to access RDPA. Currently, it is available on both MSC Datamart and MSC GeoMet .

The data can also be accessed on the Canadian Surface Prediction Archive (CaSPAr) , which is an archive of numerical weather predictions issued by Environment and Climate Change Canada.

What is the file structure and format?

Currently RDPA data is available in GRIB2 file format, click here information on file formats

RPDA GRIB2 files follow the following naming convention:

ORGANIZATION_PRODUCT_VARIABLE_OBSERVATIONCUTOFFTIME_LEVEL_GRID_YYYYMMDDHH_000

String	Description
ORGANIZATION	Refers to the group that creates the files
DATASET	Refers to the model.
VARIABLE	Refers to the variable of the analysis. For HRDPA, ACPC refers to the PR (precipitation)
Observation cut-off time	0100cutoff: Observation cut-off time is one hour after the time YYYYMMDDHH indicating that possibly not all observations have been collected 0700cutoff: Observation cut-off time is about 007 hours after the time YYYYMMDDHH indicating that a maximum of observations has likely been collected
GRID	Refers to the vertical coordinate (pressure level, surface, sub-surface, etc.). sfc = Surface
YYYYMMDDHH	The issue date and time
000	Would normally refer to the forecast hour, but is not applicable as this product is an analysis