Mean annual precipitation across South African municipalities from 1983 - 2020

This is a subset of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU)s Time-Series (TS) version 4.05 of high-resolution gridded data of month-by-month variation in climate containing precipitation (mm/year) readings from South Africas weather stations across local municipalities for the years 1983-2020. The CRU TS 4.05 dataset was developed and has been subsequently updated, improved and maintained with support from a number of funders, principally the UKs Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the US Department of Energy. Long-term support is currently provided by the UK National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS), a NERC collaborative centre. Current gridded products (CRU TS) are presented either as ASCII grids, or in NetCDF format. The gridding process used in Brohan et al.. (2006) and earlier publications assigns each station to the 5 degree latitude/longitude box within which it is located. The gridding then simply averages all available station temperatures (as anomalies from 1961-90) within each grid box for each month from 1851. No account is taken of the stations elevation or location within the grid box (anomalies show little consistent dependence on altitude). A more up-to-date location for a station is not important for the gridding, unless a site change were to move the station to an adjacent grid box. In this instance, the data was derived as a subset of the original dataset. CRU publishes the data in a NetCDF file format, however for data visualisation purposes the datasets were transformed into tidy tables and represented in the South African Risk and Vulnerability Atlas (SARVA) by the South African Environmental Observation Network`s uLwazi Node. Citation: University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit; Harris, I.C.; Jones, P.D.; Osborn, T. (2021): CRU TS4.05: Climatic Research Unit (CRU) Time-Series (TS) version 4.05 of high-resolution gridded data of month-by-month variation in climate (Jan. 1901- Dec. 2020). NERC EDS Centre for Environmental Data Analysis, 2021. https://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/c26a65020a5e4b80b20018f148556681