Skip to content

MSWEP / MSWX — introduction#

earthlens.mswep downloads raw NetCDF granules of MSWEP and MSWX from GloH2O via the Google-Drive folder shared with an approved non-commercial user.

  • MSWEP — Multi-Source Weighted-Ensemble Precipitation. Machine-learning merged gauge, satellite and reanalysis precipitation at 0.1°, hourly, 1979 → ~2 hours from real time.
  • MSWX — Multi-Source Weather, the companion bias-corrected meteorological forcing: 10 variables at 0.1° / 3-hourly. Its forecast streams extend MSWEP forward.

OUTPUT_KIND is raster and download() returns the list[Path] of granules written. earthlens does not decode them — reading and regridding NetCDF is pyramids' job, and no module under earthlens.mswep imports xarray.

Access is a prerequisite#

There is no anonymous download. You must have your own approved GloH2O access before this backend can do anything — see Authentication, which is the page to read first. GloH2O link-shares its folders, so any Google credential works — a service account, or your existing gcloud login.

Licence#

CC BY-NC 4.0 — non-commercial only, attribution required. Every request emits a LicenseWarning carrying the citation:

Wang, X., Alharbi, R. S., Baez-Villanueva, O. M., Miralles, D. G., Ma, J., Xu, S., McCabe, M. F., Pappenberger, F., van Dijk, A. I. J. M., McVicar, T. R., Karthikeyan, L., Fowler, H. J., Pan, M., Gebrechorkos, S. H., & Beck, H. E. (2026). MSWEP V3: Machine learning-powered global precipitation estimates at 0.1° hourly resolution (1979–present). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.01436

GloH2O reports that IMERG and GSMaP show a systematic precipitation increase from 2015, so MSWEP V3.15/V3.16 reads artificially low over 2000–2015 relative to the surrounding periods. It affects both Past and Past_nogauge.

"For users who require reliable trend estimates, we recommend using V2.80 for 1979–2021 until the issue is resolved." — MSWEP V3.16 Documentation

GloH2O shares a separate folder per version, so pass the folder_id for the version you want (version= then selects its catalog metadata):

EarthLens("mswep", version="2.80", ...)   # the trend-safe archive

Use rclone for bulk#

An hourly year is ~8760 granules. The Drive API is not built for that, and GloH2O asks non-commercial users to transfer via rclone. This backend is for targeted product / variant / resolution / window requests; it warns when a request exceeds the catalog's granule threshold.

The folder is link-shared, not in the account's "Shared with me", so point rclone at it by id — the same id you pass earthlens as folder_id. With --drive-root-folder-id set to that id, the remote's root is the version folder, so its children (Past / NRT / …) are addressed relative to it:

rclone sync -v --drive-root-folder-id <folder-id> GoogleDrive:Past/Daily ./mswep