clive-africa/chirps

A basic introduction to the CHIRPS rainfall dataset. # CHIRPS — South African Rainfall Analysis A Python toolkit for downloading, processing, and visualising the CHIRPS v3 daily rainfall dataset clipped to South Africa. --- ## What is CHIRPS? CHIRPS (Climate Hazards InfraRed Precipitation with Station) is a daily rainfall dataset produced by the Climate Hazards Center at UC Santa Barbara. It covers all land areas between 60°S and 60°N at a resolution of 0.05° (~2.5 km grid), from 1981 to the present — over 40 years of consistent, gridded precipitation data. Version 3, launched in early 2025, draws on over 90 sources of station data and incorporates an improved high-resolution climatology developed in partnership with the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre. It is meaningfully better at capturing extreme rainfall events than its predecessor. The full global dataset runs to approximately 23 GB per year. This repository works with a South Africa extract, reducing this to a manageable ~2 GB compressed file for all 45 years. --- ## Why does this matter for South African insurers? South Africa's weather station network has contracted over the decades. Gauge data in rural areas is patchy at best. CHIRPS fills that gap with a 44-year consistent record of daily rainfall across every square kilometre of the country. The predictive value of CHIRPS for insurance claims was demonstrated at the 2023 ASSA Convention — *Claims Modelling with Climate Data* (Richman, Mbuvha, Perumal, Balusik & Balona, 2023) — and the dataset is used in practice by organisations such as Arbol for parametric weather products and FEWS Net for early warning drought monitoring. --- ## Repository contents | File | Description | |---|---| | `chirps_sa_pipeline.py` | Downloads monthly CHIRPS v3 daily files and clips them to the South African bounding box, producing a compressed NetCDF output | | `chirps_heatmap.py` | Pixel-level heatmap dashboard comparing two user-defined periods across multiple rainfall metrics, with OpenStreetMap basemap | …