title: The Centennial Trends Greater Horn of Africa precipitation dataset.
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.
authors.affiliation: US Geological Survey National Center for Earth Resource Observation & Science (EROS), Sioux Falls, South Dakota 57198-0001, USA ; UC Santa Barbara Climate Hazards Group, Geography Department, UCSB, Santa Barbara, California 93106-4060, USA.
authors.forename: Chris
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Funk
authors.affiliation: Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science, Florida State University , Tallahassee, Florida 32306-4520, USA.
authors.forename: Sharon E
authors.initials: SE
authors.lastname: Nicholson
authors.affiliation: UC Santa Barbara Climate Hazards Group, Geography Department, UCSB, Santa Barbara, California 93106-4060, USA.
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Landsfeld
authors.affiliation: Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science, Florida State University , Tallahassee, Florida 32306-4520, USA.
authors.forename: Douglas
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Klotter
authors.affiliation: UC Santa Barbara Climate Hazards Group, Geography Department, UCSB, Santa Barbara, California 93106-4060, USA.
authors.forename: Pete
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Peterson
authors.affiliation: UC Santa Barbara Climate Hazards Group, Geography Department, UCSB, Santa Barbara, California 93106-4060, USA.
authors.forename: Laura
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Harrison
mesh_terms: D000351:Africa, Eastern; D002980:Climate; D055864:Droughts; D011891:Rain