Report on Implementation of ENACTS in the Gambia Phase-1: generating historical climate time series

Abstract

International Research Institute and partners have been leading an initiative to simultaneously improve the availability, access and use of climate information at the national level in African. This initiative, named “Enhancing National Climate Services (ENACTS)”, has already been implemented in Ethiopia, Tanzania, Madagascar and Rwanda. The Gambia is the latest addition. The first step in implementing ENACTS is assessing the available station observations. The Gambia has few stations, particularly for observing temperature. However, the time series of the available data has been found to be very good in terms of completeness and data quality than many of the countries where ENACTS has been implemented. The available data was quality controlled and merged with satellite rainfall estimates for rainfall and with reanalysis product for minimum and maximum temperatures. The proxies (satellite and reanalysis) will help in filling the spatial and temporal gaps in station observations. This work has resulted in ten-daily rainfall from 1983 to 2012 and temperature data from 1961 2012 for every 4km grid across The Gambia.