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CHIRPS

CHIRPS (Climate Hazards group InfraRed Precipitation with Station data) is a quasi-global rainfall dataset produced by the Climate Hazards Center at UC Santa Barbara. It combines satellite imagery with in-situ station data to produce gridded rainfall estimates.

Key characteristics

Property Value
Provider Climate Hazards Center, UCSB
Spatial resolution ~5 km (0.05 degree)
Temporal resolution Daily, pentadal, monthly
Coverage Global (50S-50N)
Period 1981 -- near-present
Format GeoTIFF
CRS EPSG:4326 (WGS 84)

URL pattern

The pipeline downloads daily GeoTIFFs from the CHIRPS v3.0 archive and aggregates them to monthly totals locally:

https://data.chc.ucsb.edu/products/CHIRPS/v3.0/daily/final/{flavor}/{YYYY}/
    chirps-v3.0.{flavor}.{YYYY}.{MM}.{DD}.tif

Preliminary data uses a different path:

https://data.chc.ucsb.edu/products/CHIRPS/v3.0/daily/prelim/sat/{YYYY}/
    chirps-v3.0.prelim.{YYYY}.{MM}.{DD}.tif

Default settings use stage="final" and flavor="rnl" (rain + land).

File format

  • GeoTIFF (.tif)
  • Values in millimetres (mm) of rainfall per day
  • NoData value: -9999
  • Single band per file (one day)
  • Monthly output is aggregated locally (sum of daily values)

Pipeline overview

  1. Fetch org unit geometries from DHIS2
  2. Compute bounding box from org unit extents
  3. Download daily CHIRPS v3.0 GeoTIFFs for each month
  4. Clip to bounding box and aggregate daily to monthly total (mm)
  5. Compute zonal mean precipitation per org unit per month
  6. Import monthly values into DHIS2 (period format: YYYYMM)

This approach follows the same pattern as dhis2eo -- fetching daily GeoTIFFs from CHC servers, clipping to a bounding box, and aggregating to monthly totals.

CHIRPS versions

Version Resolution Notes
CHIRPS v2.0 0.05 degree Stable, widely validated; Africa-specific products available
CHIRPS v3.0 0.05 degree Used in this pipeline; improved station blending, global daily files

References