Here we provide links to publicly available rainfall data tables. We provide copies of this data in order to further public service research efforts for analyzing Eritrea's climate. Other, more detailed data is available through Eritrea's Meteorological services. We provide only that data which is already available in the public record or through international data dissemination institutions.
Here we present tab delimited data tables of selected Eritrean
and Ethiopian stations that are available through the
Africa Data Dissemination Service, at:
http://edcintl.cr.usgs.gov/ftp2/tools/rmdata/errmdata-2-2.exe
We provide a copy here in a slightly more convenient reformatted form for the following stations:
For the WMO stations we pre-processed the data for our non-profit research purposes of providing data for climate analysis that can be used for forecasts and rainfall modeling to improve food security.
Monthly rainfall data is available from stations world-wide through FTP download from the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Also available are monthly temperature data. The site for documentation and downloads is: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v2/
For our regional research analysis, we are interested in a region between 30 and 50 degrees East longitude and 10 and 20 degrees North latitude. To pull the list of relevant stations from the precipitation station inventory file, we wrote a small perl script: findstn.pl. The result is a list of stations relevant to Eritrea regional rainfall analysis.
We then use this list of relevant stations to extract the relevant data from the WMO data file (v2.prcp) using another short Perl script: extractdata.pl. The result of running this file is a set of data files named after each of the relevant WMO rainfall stations. The datafile list can be viewed HERE
We also rank these stations with regards to completeness of record for performing analysis of Advanced Very High Resolution Radiograph (AVHRR) Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) images for the period 1979 - 2000. The ranking is made on the basis of which stations have the most complete rainfall records for this period. The file stnrank.txt ranks the different stations listing the number of years of record available for 1979-2000 and the station name.
Meanwhile a source for some Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) monthly values is at: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/ftpdata/soi.dat