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The European climatological high-resolution gauge-adjusted radar precipitation dataset, EURADCLIM, addresses the need for an accurate (sub-)daily precipitation product covering 78% of Europe at high spatial resolution. A climatological dataset of 1-h and 24-h precipitation accumulations on a 2-km grid is derived for the period 2013 through 2020. The starting point is the European Meteorological Network (EUMETNET) Operational Program on the Exchange of weather RAdar Information (OPERA) gridded radar dataset of 15-min instantaneous surface rain rates, which is based on data from, on average, 138 ground-based weather radars. First, methods are applied to further remove non-meteorological echoes from these composites by applying two statistical methods and a satellite-based cloud type mask. Second, the radar composites are merged with the European Climate Assessment & Dataset (ECA&D) with potentially ~7700 rain gauges from National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHS) in order to substantially improve its quality. Characteristics of the radar, rain gauge and satellite datasets are presented, as well as a detailed account of the applied algorithms. The clutter removal algorithms are effective, while removing few precipitation echoes. The usefulness of EURADCLIM for quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE) is confirmed by comparing against rain gauge accumulations employing scatter density plots, statistical metrics, and a spatial verification. These show a strong improvement with respect to the original OPERA product. The potential of EURADCLIM to derive pan-European precipitation climatologies and to evaluate extreme precipitation events is shown. Specific attention is given to remaining artefacts in and limitations of EURADCLIM. Finally, it is recommended to further improve EURADCLIM by applying algorithms to 3D instead of 2D radar data, and by obtaining more rain gauge data for the radar-gauge merging. The EURADCLIM 1-h and 24-h precipitation datasets are publicly available at https://doi.org/10.21944/7ypj-wn68 (Overeem et al., 2022a) and https://doi.org/10.21944/1a54-gg96 (Overeem et al., 2022b). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The quality of OPERA radar precipitation composites is assessed during 2015–2017. • SYNOP gauges records over Europe are used as reference and to adjust OPERA rainfall. • 3 years analysis shows improvement in the radar composites after rain gauge adjustment. • The daily monitoring shows gradual improvements of the OPERA composite itself. • Adjusted OPERA composites are useful for pan-European flash flood hazard assessment. Monitoring continental precipitation over Europe with high resolution (2 km, 15 min) has been possible since the operational production of the OPERA composites from the European weather radar networks. The OPERA data are the essential input to a hazard assessment tool for identifying localized rainfall-induced flash floods at European scale, and their quality determines the performance of the tool. This paper analyses the OPERA data quality during the warm seasons of 2015–2017 by comparing the estimated rainfall accumulations with the SYNOP rain gauge records over Europe. To compensate the OPERA underestimation, a simple spatially-variable bias adjustment method has been applied. The long-term comparison between the OPERA and gauge point daily rainfall accumulations at the gauge locations shows the benefit of the bias adjustment. Additionally, the daily monitoring shows gradual improvement of the OPERA data year by year. The impact of the quality of the OPERA data for effective flash flood identification is demonstrated for the case of the flash floods that occurred from 29 May to 3 June 2016 in central Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]