Sao Tome and Principe: Subnational Dekadal Rainfall and Forecasts

WFP provides dekadal rainfall indicators for Sao Tome and Principe aggregated by subnational administrative units. The data integrates CHIRPS v2 satellite imagery with CHIRPS-GEFS forecasts to provide 10-day, 1-month, and 3-month precipitation metrics and anomalies.

Use Cases

• Assessing agricultural water stress by comparing 3-month rolling rainfall (r3h) to its long-term average (r3h_avg)
• Identifying precipitation deficits using the rainfall anomaly percentage (rfq) at the subnational level
• Short-term climate planning using 10-day rainfall forecasts (rfh) filtered by the type column

Strengths

• Includes Pcode references for direct integration with WFP administrative boundary datasets
• Provides both historical averages and real-time forecasts in a single source
• Contains pixel count metadata (n_pixels) for transparency on aggregation quality

Limitations

• Geographic scope is restricted to Sao Tome and Principe
• Satellite-derived precipitation estimates may vary from local ground-based rain gauge measurements
• Finalized data has a mid-month lag for the previous month's records

Provenance

Source

World Food Programme (WFP)

Collection Method

Aggregated from CHIRPS v2 satellite imagery and CHIRPS-GEFS forecasts.

Freshness

Updated six times per month on the 1st, 6th, 11th, 16th, 21st, and 26th.

Geography

Sao Tome and Principe