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I am looking for a time-series of hourly precipitation for Naples, Italy. I'd like to learn how to find this sort of data for Italy in general, as well.

Ideally this data would cover a recent year with no gaps greater than a few days, and would come as a spreadsheet with time-stamps and precipitation measurements on the hour side-by-side. I'm not picky and will format as needed, but I haven't found anything close to this yet. Also, public-domain/open-data is much preferred (we all like free things right?) but is not a limiting factor in my search.

Research thus far:

I've searched and cannot find a text-based data source as I described. I think the closest source I've got is the following, which does not have observed hourly precip: https://weatherspark.com/history/32302/2014/Naples-Campania-Italy On that page it says:

Precipitation

This station provides hourly reports of significant weather events at and around the station, but does not report the quantity of precipitation at the station itself. This is common for weather stations located outside of the United States, and for a small subset of stations in the United States that are located at lesser used and smaller airports.

I'm familiar with the difficulty of getting hourly precipitation and certain other meteorological variables from most weather stations outside of the U.S. and major international airports. In many cases, locals have been able to help me, often by providing the data themselves (these locals tend to be experts) or sharing the right channel to reach out to in their country's national government or research institutions. I haven't had such success in Italy though, but I only know/have asked a couple of relevant scientists. In part I'm hoping this question will serve as me asking more Earth scientists who work in Italy.

I've searched the European Union Open Data Portal, which feels like it would be the right place but is not (yet) as far as I have seen.

In searching for digital elevation data (which I'll be using with the precip data in this project), a Cornell page pointed me to Italy's Military Geographical Institute. From what I can tell through a Google Translate lens, this site doesn't offer hourly precip data. I don't speak Italian and have only poked around a couple of pages, so I could be missing something.

I turn to you, ES:SE. Where can I find historic hourly precipitation data for Napoli, Italia?

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    $\begingroup$ Open to tag suggestions. I tried: italy, data-sources, data-sets. Can't create new tags with <150 rep. Open-data tag exists but doesn't feel quite right because I'm just asking about data sources in general and not only open data. $\endgroup$
    – cr0
    Jan 7, 2016 at 21:52
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    $\begingroup$ Have you tried hymex.org? HyMeX aims at a better understanding, quantification and modelling of the hydrological cycle in the Mediterranean. Good luck $\endgroup$
    – arkaia
    Jan 7, 2016 at 22:38
  • $\begingroup$ @aretxabaleta I hadn't yet. The HyMeX database looks promising from what data sets & metadata I've found so far. I'll download and dig into the data sets tomorrow. Thanks for the suggestion. $\endgroup$
    – cr0
    Jan 8, 2016 at 3:05

1 Answer 1

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The US NCDC has this link to surface hourly global data which I was indeed able to find Napoli on.

It appears, based upon this page describing the World Data Center For Meteorology, that there may be restrictions on using the data commercially outside of the United States.

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    $\begingroup$ Apologies, not sure how the link got cut off. I believe I've fixed it. The one problem with NCDC is it can be a bit mysterious how to find what you're looking for at times. But hopefully that solves it. $\endgroup$
    – JeopardyTempest
    Jan 11, 2017 at 3:32
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    $\begingroup$ Works now! Up voting. $\endgroup$
    – f.thorpe ♦
    Jan 11, 2017 at 5:47

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