Earthdata Forum

Hello,
My name is Shukuru, I'm a Master's student at the Université du Québec à Montréal. I'm doing my research on climate change in Ethiopia, as part of my Master's thesis. Ethiopia is an East African country with major climate challenges. I'm exploring the consequences of climate change on migration.

Therefore, I need temperature and precipitation data since 1800, or the period available in data. However, in several attempts, I have explored the NAZA sites (GIOVANNI, Data Access Viewer, etc.) but I am unable to obtain data for Ethiopia by zone. In fact, I'm looking for Ethiopian data grouped by zone.

So, I'm turning to you, please help me with directions to find this climate data (temperature and rainfall) for Ethiopia by zones.

Hello Shukuru,

We would be glad to assist with the use of Giovanni. Note that because the data is either from satellites or from models that utilized satellite data as input, it will not go back as far as the 1800s. Some datasets begin in the 1980s (1979 is considered the beginning of the satellite era of Earth observation), and many of them start in the late 1990s.

In order to assist you further, please define what you mean by zones. Is this a geographical term, i.e., governmentally-defined regional boundaries, or is it biogeographical, such as biomes or different climates, such as defined by different elevations? Then we can determine how to further assist you.

Hello,

I'm very pleased to read your quick reply.

Indeed, "Zone" is a geographical subdivision of the country. The country is Ethiopia, subdivided into Regions and the Regions are in turn subdivided into Zones. I need data (temperature and rainfall) at zone level.

I hope that my answer gives an understanding of my request.

Thank you

Hello, sorry for the delay for this reply. We do not have a capability for countries to provide data for geographic boundaries other than the country boundary. Thus, such regions as counties or provinces, or as you describe, zones, cannot be delineated with shapefiles. Our best recommendation is to use the bounding box boundaries to describe the zone boundaries as closely as possible.

Hello, I hope that you are well.

Thank you for your response and recommendation.
However, I am not sure to understand this recommendation. I do not know how to use the bounding box boundaries to describe the zone boundaries as closely as possible.
So, I need your help once more.

Regards,
Shukuru K.

I looked at a map of Ethiopia that showed the zones, and this technique likely would not work for the smaller zones. However, the larger zones may be approximated with a bounding box. My example is for the Borena zone.

Because this is satellite data, the spatial resolution of the data may be larger than the size of the zone region. Have you examined the different variables in Giovanni that you may wish to use?