Senegal Climate Raster Data: Wind, Rainfall, and Wet Days

UNEP/FAO/ESRI digitized this Senegal Climate Dataset from hand-drawn maps for the Desertification Hazard Mapping project. It contains three raster files depicting mean annual wind velocity, number of wet days per year, and mean annual rainfall. The data was rasterized by GRID-Geneva in December 1988 with a cell size of 30 seconds and two minutes lat/lon.

Use Cases

• Analyze spatial patterns of mean annual wind velocity from the SENEGAL4 file for renewable energy siting.
• Model agricultural suitability using the number of wet days per year from the SENEGAL5 file.
• Assess drought or flood risk by examining the mean annual rainfall classes in the SENEGAL6 file.
• Compare historical climate baselines from the 1980s with contemporary satellite-derived climate data.

Strengths

• Contains three distinct thematic raster layers for wind, rainfall, and wet days.
• Data was digitized and rasterized at a continental scale with a defined cell size of 30 seconds and two minutes lat/lon.
• Produced through a collaboration of authoritative organizations: UNEP, FAO, and ESRI.

Limitations

• Original source scale is unknown, and the documentation notes limited applicability at the national scale as it was extracted from a continental dataset.
• Data is temporally stale, with a report publication date of December 1988, representing a historical snapshot.
• Specific row/column counts, file sizes, and exact spatial resolution in modern terms are unspecified.

Provenance

Source

UNEP/FAO/ESRI Database for Africa, digitized from FAO hand-drawn maps.

Collection Method

Rasterized by GRID-Geneva from digitized coverages for the CISFAM Senegal Database.

Time Range

Report published December 1988; underlying map data likely from the 1980s or earlier.

Geography

Senegal, though extracted from a continental-scale dataset for Africa.