Summary

Description

As of 2012, a new gridded, daily 30 year precipitation estimation dataset centered over Africa at 0.1? spatial resolution has been developed. The Africa Rainfall Climatology version 2 (ARC2) is a revision of the first version of the ARC and is consistent with the operational Rainfall Estimation, version 2, algorithm (RFE2). ARC2 uses inputs from two sources: 1) 3-hourly geostationary infrared (IR) data centered over Africa from the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) and 2) quality controlled Global Telecommunication System (GTS) gauge observations reporting 24-hour rainfall accumulations over Africa. The main difference between with ARC2 resides in the recalibration of all Meteosat First Generation (MFG) IR data (1983-2005). Validation and inter-comparison results show that ARC2 is a major improvement over ARC1, and is consistent with other long-term historical datasets such as Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) and Climate Prediction Center Merged Analysis of Precipitation (CMAP).