New Precipitation Best Estimate Data Released for Evaluation

Published: 30 December 2025

Time-series plots generated using the PrecipBE Jupyter Notebook show the precipitation rate (top) and cumulative precipitation (bottom) during two CACTI precipitation events on November 11, 2018. The plots depict the instrument-mean, mean ± standard deviation (σ), minimum, and maximum throughout each event (see legend). These statistics are all included in the precipbetseries datastream files. Images are from Israel Silber, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

New evaluation data from the Precipitation Best Estimate value-added product (PrecipBE VAP) are now available for the 2018–2019 Cloud, Aerosol, and Complex Terrain Interactions (CACTI) field campaign in Argentina and the 2014–2015 Green Ocean Amazon (GoAmazon2014/15) campaign in Brazil.

PrecipBE provides time-series data and statistics on precipitation events measured at ground level by the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) User Facility. Processed using a per-event approach, this VAP cuts overhead and streamlines the use of ARM precipitation data for process understanding and model evaluation studies. It integrates all available precipitation data from an ARM site while incorporating ARM Data Quality Reports and data validity considerations.

The VAP creates two daily data products: precipbetseries, which provides time-series data of per-event cumulative precipitation and precipitation rates at one-minute resolution; and precipbestats, which includes per-event statistics in an easy-to-use, one-dimensional (tabular) format. The precipbestats product also provides ancillary atmospheric state data corresponding to each event.

More information about PrecipBE is available in a recently published preprint and on the VAP web page. A Jupyter Notebook demonstrating use of the PrecipBE VAP is available on the ARM-Notebooks GitHub repository.

Access the new PrecipBE data in the ARM Data Center. (To download the data, first create an ARM account.)

For questions or to report data issues before the VAP moves to production, please contact Israel Silber.

The precipbetseries data can be referenced as doi:10.5439/2523642. The precipbestats data can be referenced as doi:10.5439/2523640.