Weather Stations of Africa : names and coordinates (database SIEREM)

This dataset contains Weather Station Name, Country Name, Latitude, Longitude, Years of activity : start and end of observations of Africa issued from SIEREM database, for about 7793 meteorological stations covering all regions of Africa between 1837 and 2019. SIEREM (Environmental Information system on Water Resources and their Modelling) http://www.hydrosciences.fr/sierem is developed by HydroSciences Montpellier research unit. The team studies, on a regional scale, hydrological variability on the African continent and the Mediterranean borders. The team is interested not in the climatic origins of this variability but in the impacts it is supposed to have on the water resources. The regional scale on one hand and, on the other hand, the taking into account of the various structuring elements of the milieu (soil, vegetation etc.) force to be based on a set of environmental knowledge covering the studied zone. It is the reason why SIEREM was carried out. The dataset will first give us a measure of the extent to which African states at the time covered their country territory, trivially to set up weather stations. Secondly, we noticed that the names of some stations, paired with their coordinates, could be useful to projects as historical colonial state presence in Africa, for geocoding several historical maps and sources, to find information accurate for settlements/schools, villages, concessions and name of weather stations explicitly refer to. The information generally needed for a meteorological station relates to its geographical position and the date of start observation. A hydrometeorological network is a set of stations distributed in the space to which we measure, for an indefinite period or not, a certain number of parameters concerning one or more hydrological or meteorological phenomena. The network of rain gauges (weather station) is generally well distributed over the sub-basins and overall catchment area.