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CatRaRE heavy-rainfall events — introduction#

CatRaRE (Catalogue of Radar-based Rainfall Events) is DWD's objectively-defined catalogue of heavy-rainfall events over Germany, derived from the RADKLIM radar climatology, covering 2001–2025. Each event is a space–time cluster of intense rainfall with attributes such as duration, area, maximum rainfall, and a severity index. earthlens ships a single catrare backend that downloads the event FileGDB directly from DWD's open-data host (opendata.dwd.de, CC-BY-4.0 / GeoNutzV, no credentials) and returns the events as vector features.

This page orients the backend. For the hands-on download walkthrough see Usage; the rendered API is the Reference page.

Why it matters here#

CatRaRE is the event companion to the RADKLIM grids (radar / radklim). The gridded product tells you how much rain fell where; CatRaRE distils that into discrete, comparable events — "a 5-year, 80-km² cloudburst on 14 July 2021" — which is the natural unit for pluvial-flood and heavy-rainfall-impact analysis.

Like the GDACS, Aqueduct, and FLOPROS backends, CatRaRE departs from the gridded backends in that its output is a vector table, not a grid, so the facade rejects an aggregate= argument. It has a light time axis: the archive is static, so start / end are optional and, when supplied, simply filter the events by date rather than drive a download loop.

Thresholds#

Two threshold selections are published, chosen with threshold=:

  • t5 — events whose rainfall reaches at least a 5-year return period.
  • w3 — a severity-weighted selection (based on the Eta severity index).

Geometry layers#

Each threshold's FileGDB carries two layers, chosen with geometry_layer=:

  • zones (default) — the event-footprint polygons (EventZones).
  • points — the maximum-rainfall points (RRmaxPoints), one per event.

Coordinate system#

The FileGDB geometry is stored in the DWD RADOLAN polar-stereographic grid and carries no embedded CRS. The backend assigns the RADOLAN projection and reprojects every result to EPSG:4326, so a lat_lim / lon_lim bounding box and the returned coordinates are ordinary WGS84 longitude/latitude.

Licence#

CatRaRE is CC-BY-4.0 / GeoNutzV. Cite Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD), CatRaRE v2026.01 (RADKLIM). The backend logs the attribution on every download. A CSV of the same 67 event attributes (without geometry) is published alongside each FileGDB on the DWD server for non-spatial use.