The Centennial Trends Greater Horn of Africa precipitation dataset

Scientific Data
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Abstract

East Africa is a drought prone, food and water insecure region with a highly variable climate. This complexity makes rainfall estimation challenging, and this challenge is compounded by low rain gauge densities and inhomogeneous monitoring networks. The dearth of observations is particularly problematic over the past decade, since the number of records in globally accessible archives has fallen precipitously. This lack of data coincides with an increasing scientific and humanitarian need to place recent seasonal and multi-annual East African precipitation extremes in a deep historic context. To serve this need, scientists from the UC Santa Barbara Climate Hazards Group and Florida State University have pooled their station archives and expertise to produce a high quality gridded ‘Centennial Trends’ precipitation dataset. Additional observations have been acquired from the national meteorological agencies and augmented with data provided by other universities. Extensive quality control of the data was carried out and seasonal anomalies interpolated using kriging. This paper documents the CenTrends methodology and data.

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Publication type Article
Publication Subtype Journal Article
Title The Centennial Trends Greater Horn of Africa precipitation dataset
Series title Scientific Data
DOI 10.1038/sdata.2015.50
Volume 2
Year Published 2015
Language English
Publisher Nature
Contributing office(s) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center
Description Article 150050; 15 p.
Other Geospatial Africa
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