DOI: 10.25375/uct.16453452
title: Winter Rainfall Zone 2019 station rainfall dataset

description: The publicly available components of the WRZ (South African Winter Rainfall Zone) 2019 rainfall dataset. <b>Please acknowledge the original data providers when using these data! </b>These data are collected here in a consistent format, for easy use and assimilation, or to preserve them if they become unavailable in the future. <br><br>The data cover the period 1979-2019. The 24-hour recording period for daily totals in all cases end 8am the following day. <br><br>WRZ2019meta.csv contains a list of the stations used in the dataset with meta data. <br><br>Data that are freely accessible are uploaded in this item: daily data in wide-format and monthly data in long-format. Department of Water Affairs and Sanitation (DWS) monthly (suffix: mon) and daily (suffix: 2019) data are included. SAWS (South African Weather Service) daily data and CoCT daily and monthly data are not freely accessible and can be requested for research purposed from info4@weathersa.co.za (SAWS) or (CoCT). SAWS cumulative data are also recorded in wide-format: monthly data in Mon_dwb.csv, 10-day data in totals (with end date specified as "date") in 10dayrain.csv and others in SAWS_cumulates.csv. SAWS accumulated data are provisional totals obtained from: https://www.weathersa.co.za/home/recentclimate. Wide-format daily SYNOP data for 2016-2019 obtained from meteomanz.com are included in the mm2019.csv. <br><br>For the metadata file, the first column (Station Name) contains the names data providers use for their stations, the second column (Name Used) contains the name of the station used in our study. This name may differ from the original to ensure that the same name is used for all records from a given station, to ensure uniqueness where multiple stations have the same name, or in the interest of shortness and familiarity. <br><br>The "Source" column identifies the institution providing the data: <br>&gt; "SAWS" is the South African Weather Service (data not freely available: request from info4@weathersa.co.za);<br>&gt; "DWS" is the South African National Department of Water Affairs and Sanitation, whose data are included in this item, and can be downloaded freely from https://www.dws.gov.za/Hydrology/Verified/hymain.aspx;<br>&gt; "CoCT" is the City of Cape Town Bulk Water Department; these data may be requested from Lloyd.FisherJeffes@capetown.gov.za; weekly updates of some of these data are published at: https://resource.capetown.gov.za/documentcentre/Documents/City research reports and review/damlevels.pdf;<br>&gt; "mm" means data were obtained from SYNOP reports of SAWS stations available through http://www.meteomanz.com/<br><br>The latitude ("lat"), longitude ("lon") and elevation ("elev") of the station provided by this institution is then listed (NA if none is provided), followed by the ID code it uses to identify the station and the start and end dates of their record used here. The "Equivalent" column lists other institutions with records for the same station. The "Nearest Neighbour" column indicates whether nearest neighbour infilling is preferentially employed for a given station, in this case listing the stations used as its neighbours; NA indicates that nearest neighbour infilling is not applied for this station. The type column indicates whether the record is a primary record for a station in dataset ("primary"), used exclusiviely as a nearest neighbour ("NN"), or to extend the POR of a primary record forward or backward ("completion"). <br><br><br>