The World's Precipitation in 2018

One benefit of viewing nicely gridded data is that many subtle spatial patterns can be resolved, as illustrated with the total precipitation data shown on this page. Click through the 2018 monthly data to see how these features undergo subtle changes over time. You will notice ...

  • Precipitation is concentrated in a narrow band that wraps around the equatorial regions (sometimes making more than one complete circle around the planet). This is the Intertropical Convergence Zone
  • Precipitation is concentrated along numerous storm tracks along a SW-NE axis in the Northern Hemisphere, but a NW-SE axis in the Southern Hemisphere, reflecting the prevailing wind flow
  • In September, an unusually long NW-SE oriented storm track crosses the Atlantic. This storm was Hurricane Florence, which cause massive flooding in the Souteastern United States.

Explore more of 2018's weather!
Acknowledgements
thank you

The maps and data are courtesy of the Copernicus Climate Change service.

The data is freely available (with a registered account) through the

Climata Data Store Toolbox. The Toolbox includes a (beta) Python API that lets you generate images, download files, and more with customized data processing.

A special thanks to all the scientists and developers whose hard work has made amazing visualizations like these available to the public!

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Last updated 05-08-2019 by Andrew Guenthner. Released under the MIT Open Source License