ARR Data Hub
Gov-Public
The official portal for Australian Rainfall & Runoff design inputs — losses, temporal patterns and preburst.
Data, Monitoring & ForecastingActiveIDF CurvesDesign Storms
CHIRPS
ActiveGauge-blended satellite rainfall at 0.05°, daily, since 1981 — the standard for drainage work in data-sparse regions.
by Climate Hazards Center, UC Santa Barbara
- Pricing
- Free
- License
- Free, no registration required
- Commercial use
- Permitted
- Ecosystem
- Google Earth Engine, Python, GDAL
- Platform
- Windows, macOS, Linux
About CHIRPS
CHIRPS (Climate Hazards InfraRed Precipitation with Station data), from UC Santa Barbara's Climate Hazards Center, blends infrared satellite imagery with in-situ station records into a 0.05° (~5km) quasi-global rainfall record spanning 1981 to near-present. It was built specifically for drought monitoring and food-security work in Africa, and that gauge-blending discipline makes it unusually trustworthy versus satellite-only products.
For H&H work anywhere gauge networks are thin, CHIRPS is often the first rainfall dataset to reach for — long enough for frequency analysis, fine enough for catchment-scale modelling, and free with no registration.
Where it fits in the workflow
TerrainCatchmentRainfallRunoffRoutingHydraulicsMappingReporting
Alternatives to CHIRPS
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ERA5 / ERA5-Land
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GPM IMERG
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NASA's 30-minute, 0.1° global precipitation record — the highest time resolution of any satellite rainfall product.
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MERRA-2
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NASA's satellite-era atmospheric reanalysis — hourly global fields from 1980, the default alternative to ERA5.
Data, Monitoring & ForecastingActiveClimate Reanalysis DataRainfall Data