Daily climate data for the Amhara region in Northwestern Ethiopia

Many spatial vegetative physiological and environmental impact studies demand consistent as well as fine resolution daily meteorological data, which is often unavailable. This problem is evident when studies and applications focus at the regional and local scale. Meteorological stations cannot provide the needed data due to their irregular locations and several associated shortcomings such as missing data. Climate data from global sources like the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and WorldClim are provided at a coarse resolution which makes them inappropriate to use directly at regional and local scales. In order to circumvent this problem, we downscaled daily WorldClim and NCEP global climate grids to produce weather data sets using a delta method to 0.0083‾ (approximately 1 × 1 km) spatial resolution for the Amhara region of northwestern Ethiopia. The downscaled data set includes daily precipitation, and minimum and maximum temperature from 1979 to 2010. The drizzle effect in the downscaled data set was first eliminated by using a rain threshold that removed values of