Quasi-global climatology measurements, recorded from 1981 to 2016.

The dataset for this challenge consists of the following measurements:

  • Monthly gauge observations collected from weather stations. This consists of name, location (longitude, latitude and elevation) of the weather stations as well as the rainfall measurements.
  • Monthly Climate Hazards group InfraRed Precipitation (CHIRP) measurements

Background

The CHIRP value is an estimate of precipitation for given time. It is give in total mm units.

Climate Hazards group InfraRed Precipitation (CHIRP) measurements are calculated from the following information:

  • CHPclim, which is derived from location (elevation, longitude, latitude) as well as five other monthly long term mean satellite products
  • Cold cloud duration observations

The data provided in this challenge is a subset of the datasets provided by the Climate Hazards Group (CHG) on their main data site. Overall descriptions of data can be found in their FAQ

Related publications from the CHG are accessible at

  • Funk, C.C., Peterson, P.J., Landsfeld, M.F., Pedreros, D.H., Verdin, J.P., Rowland, J.D., Romero, B.E., Husak, G.J., Michaelsen, J.C., and Verdin, A.P., 2014, A quasi-global precipitation time series for drought monitoring: U.S. Geological Survey Data Series 832, 4 p.https://pubs.usgs.gov/ds/832/

  • Funk, Chris, Pete Peterson, Martin Landsfeld, Diego Pedreros, James Verdin, Shraddhanand Shukla, Gregory Husak, James Rowland, Laura Harrison, Andrew Hoell & Joel Michaelsen. “The climate hazards infrared precipitation with stations—a new environmental record for monitoring extremes”. Scientific Data 2, 150066. doi:10.1038/sdata.2015.66 2015 http://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201566

Challenge

There are two sets of data. The first set is CHIRP data, which is prediction of precipitation across most of the globe, these predictions are derived from measurements such as temperature infrared satellite readings. CHIRP measurements are given monthly from 1981 to 2016.

The second is a set of monthly rainfall measurements from selected ground stations. Rainfall measurements are given monthly for the same period of years but the set of ground stations are not identical from month to month. This set of rainfall readings are assumed be close to, and represent ground truth.

The challenge is to predict monthly rainfall at an arbitrary geographic location given only CHIRP data.

Note: The CHG focuses on predicting precipitation in locations with sparse weather station density due to terrain, economic or political stability. For the purpose of our task, we will predict precipitation for areas with known weather station data.

This difference in task is due to the following: 1) The pentads data used by the CHG for their tasks is not accessible to us. 2) For the purpose of our challenge we require known data for estimating prediction performance.

Data

Rainfall measurements from the stations are provided monthly in CSV files, a sample is provided below:

id source latitude longitude elevation name value
12995 GHCN-v2 37.150002 128.17999 264 CHECH ON 21.700001

Chirp measurements are provided monthly in TIFF files, a sample is provided below:

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