<p>There is a growing interest in emerging opportunistic sensors for precipitation estimates, motivated by the need to describe with detail precipitation structures. In this work a preliminary assessment of the accuracy of Commercial Microwave Links (CMLs) retrieved rainfall rates in northern Italy is presented. The CML product, obtained by the publicly available RAINLINK package, is evaluated at different scales (single link, 5 km x 5 km grid, river basin) against the precipitation products operationally used at Arpae-SIMC, the Regional Weather Service of Emilia-Romagna, in northern Italy. The results of the 15 min single-link validation with close-by raingauges show high variability, with influence of the area physiography and precipitation patterns and the impact of some known issues (e.g. melting layer). However, hourly cumulated spatially interpolated CML rainfall maps, validated with respect to the established regional gauge-based reference, show performances (R<sup>2</sup> of 0.47 and CV of 0.77) which are very similar, when not even better, to satellite- and adjusted radar-based precipitation gridded products. This is especially true when basin-scale total precipitation amounts are considered (R<sup>2</sup> of 0.85 and CV of 0.63). Taking into account also delays in the availability of the data (latency of 0.33 hours for CML against 1 hour for the adjusted radar and 24 h for the quality controlled raingauges), CMLs appear as a valuable data source in particular from a local operational framework perspective. A diffuse underestimation is evident at both grid box (Mean Error of −0.26) and basin scale (Multiplicative Bias of 0.7), while the number of false alarms is generally low and gets even lower as coverage increases. Finally, results show complementary strengths for CMLs and radars, encouraging a joint exploitation.</p>