CHIRPS Background
Since 1999, USGS and CHC scientists—supported by funding from USAID, NASA, and NOAA—have developed techniques for producing rainfall maps, especially in areas where surface data is sparse.
Estimating rainfall variations in space and time is a key aspect of drought early warning and environmental monitoring. An evolving drier-than-normal season must be placed in a historical context so that the severity of rainfall deficits can be quickly evaluated. However, estimates derived from satellite data provide areal averages that suffer from biases due to complex terrain, which often underestimate the intensity of extreme precipitation events. Conversely, precipitation grids produced from station data suffer in more rural regions where there are less rain-gauge stations. CHIRPS was created in collaboration with scientists at the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center in order to deliver complete, reliable, up-to-date data sets for a number of early warning objectives, like trend analysis and seasonal drought monitoring.
Early research focused on combining models of terrain-induced precipitation enhancement with interpolated station data. More recently, new resources of satellite observations like gridded satellite-based precipitation estimates from NASA and NOAA have been leveraged to build high resolution (0.05°) gridded precipitation climatologies. When applied to satellite-based precipitation fields, these improved climatologies can remove systematic bias—a key technique in the production of the 1981 to near-present CHIRPS data set. The creation of CHIRPS has supported drought monitoring efforts by the USAID Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET).
CHIRPS Overview
Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station data (CHIRPS) is a 35+ year quasi-global rainfall data set. Spanning 50°S-50°N (and all longitudes) and ranging from 1981 to near-present, CHIRPS incorporates our in-house climatology, CHPclim, 0.05° resolution satellite imagery, and in-situ station data to create gridded rainfall time series for trend analysis and seasonal drought monitoring.
Read more about CHIRPS here: https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201566
To find answers to basic questions related to CHIRPS, please visit our CHIRPS FAQ
Access CHIRPS
https://data.chc.ucsb.edu/products/CHIRPS-2.0/
https://clim-engine-development.appspot.com/fewsNet
https://climateserv.servirglobal.net/
https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/UCSB-CHG_CHIRPS_DAILY
https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/UCSB-CHG_CHIRPS_PENTAD