Contextual Data: Precipitation
The table below lists some of the more commonly cited sources of precipitation data. Researchers are encouraged to explore other resources and identify those data that best address their research questions. The precipitation sources are all composed of raster (grid-cell) data. An excellent resource for exploring other precipitation datasets is the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
A Jupyter notebook and python script detailing how CHIRPS data can be combined with IPUMS geography data can be downloaded here
Precipitation Data Sources
| Dataset | Spatial extent | Temporal extent | Spatial resolution (highest) | Temporal resolution (highest) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CHIRPS - Climate Hazards InfraRed Precipitation with Station data (version 2) | GLOBAL | 1981 - Present1 | Multiple (0.05°x 0.05°) |
Multiple (Sub-Daily) |
Funk et al. (2015) |
| CHELSA - high-resolution land surface temperature and precipitation | GLOBAL | 1979 - Present | 30 arc sec | Monthly | Karger et al. (2021) |
| GPCC - Global Precipitation Climatology Centre | GLOBAL | 1891 - Present | Multiple (0.50° x 0.50°) |
Multiple (Daily) |
Scham et al. (2016) |
| APHRODITE: Asian Precipitation - Highly-Resolved Observational Data Integration Towards Evaluation of Water Resources | ASIA | 1951 - Present | Multiple (0.25° x 0.25°) |
Daily | Hamada et al. (2012) |
- "Present" indicates that the dataset is still actively being updated. For certain datasets, however, very recent years may not yet be available.
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