Texas A&M University, College Station, TX provides global CFSR data from 1979 to 2014,  you can access it through this link:

http://globalweather.tamu.edu/

Thank you very much for the informative reply Abeyou. This looks rather promising but annoyling the data range ends before the end of 2014 which is a bit of a shame.

You can check this from MPEG, the data is available from 2010 to 9/17/2015. You can read the data with ILWIS which is a open source GIS tool. Data is available here: ftp://ftp.itc.nl/pub/mpe/msg/

You can easily obtain satellite rainfall data from TMPA and now GPM at 0,25° resolution and sub-daily (3-hour) time scale.

See here: http://pmm.nasa.gov/data-access/downloads/gpm

You can easily obtain satellite rainfall data from TMPA and now GPM at 0,25° resolution and sub-daily (3-hour) time scale.

See here: http://pmm.nasa.gov/data-access/downloads/gpm

Hi Chris, have you heard about this project? http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/fetchclimate/ They have developed a helpful tool to fetch updated environmental data from multiple sources using a single simple platform. You can access to multiple climate variables at different spatial and temporal resolution. Take a look at it. Regards, Jorge

Jorge: Very interesting to know that microsoft is doing some research in climate. Thanks for sharing the link. 

You can also check out the Global Historical Climatology Network. They have timelines going way back, but also data up to 2014 (though not for all stations):

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/land-based-station-data/land-based-datasets/global-historical-climatology-network-ghcn

In addition to ground based observations from synoptic stations mentioned above, you may wish to check the following satellite-based rainfall estimates of rainfall: 

-- pan-African TAMSAT 

http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/~tamsat

-- pan-African ARC2

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/fews/AFR_CLIM/afr_clim.shtml

-- global CHIRPS 

http://chg.geog.ucsb.edu/data/chirps/

-- ...and many others at the link below from the IPWG.

http://www.isac.cnr.it/~ipwg/data/datasets.html

Hope this is useful. 

Thanks Elena, these links look really promising if a little daunting.

Hi!

In case you may need more details from the ground you may consider contacting Pangani Basin offices which is managing the area your interested in. Their website link is:

 http://www.panganibasin.com/

http://www.panganibasin.com/index.php/activities/category/water_resources_data/

All the best.

There are different datasets of rainfall you could use depending on your goal. They vary in temporal and spatial resolution. You could use satellite data from the Tropical Rainfall mission (http://pmm.nasa.gov/trmm) with 0.25 degree of resolution and subdaily temporal resolution, gauge data integrated with satellite data at about  1 degree of resolution and daily temp. resolution (GPCP, http://precip.gsfc.nasa.gov/), reanalysis data at about 80 km of resolution from ERA-INTERIM  from the ECMWF (http://apps.ecmwf.int/datasets/data/interim-full-daily) and rainfall data obtained through satellite soil moisture (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261675491_Soil_as_a_natural_rain_gauge_Estimating_global_rainfall_from_satellite_soil_moisture_data) . There many others you can ask I can help you.

Regards

Christian

Article Soil as a natural rain gauge: Estimating global rainfall fro...

Dear Chris Uzzell,

Please, visit NOAA meteo DB site

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/gsod

Find Tanzania in country list, and read enough data for TZ, and select necessary locations from

ish-history.txt

For example,

637330  - Musoma 

637560 – Mwanza, etc.

Best regards,

      Victor Popovych

It will depend on your goal, but probably TRMM data will good for you.

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Where_do_I_obtain_rainfall_data_from_1990_up_to_2015_for_Albania

Hi,

Regarding precipitation (which is the main forcing for terrestial water cycle), I believe that validation is important before application, not only by just comparing the data with observed time series (with raingauge data or hydrological modelling) but also comparing certain features of the time series is important.

We publish this short article in a early career journal evaluating two P global products recently produce making the assessment with some precipitation indexes.

Article Analysis of precipitation features estimated by reanalysis d...

Regards

Hi

If you use Precipitation from remote sensing products, you can improve their performance using local raingauges. The merging algorithm described in this work have proved to be successful in reducing the remote sensed field error. In the paper the parameters of the merging are analyzed against the raingauges density so that one defines their value with the features of the local raingauge network and, therefore, one will not need to perform a calibration procedure.

Conference Paper Analysis of the kernel bandwidth influence in the double smo...

The Water Cycle Integrator of the eartH2Observe project have several global precipitation dataset at

http://www.earth2observe.eu/

Regards

Hi, You can extent the time frame of data that you have and improve its accuracy by merging information. Want to improve the performance of your hydrological model on a scarce data basin?!! We introduce you to our new article where a satellite-reanalysis-gauge merging algorithm is detailed. Article Improving Rainfall Fields in Data-Scarce Basins: Influence o...