Daily Precipitation Data for the Mexico City Metropolitan Area from 1930 to 2015

Abstract

The Metropolitan Zone of Mexico City, as well as the associated basin, includes the territories of Mexico City, some municipalities of the State of Mexico and the state of Hidalgo. In addition, this area is the most densely populated in Mexico. The region is influenced by mid-latitude and tropical weather systems and is vulnerable to extreme hydrometeorological events. In this context, we developed a dataset from the records of 136 geolocated sites that includes daily precipitation data from the CLImate COMputing (CLICOM) project and the Mexico City Water System. The data spans the period from 1930 to 2015 for the rainy months (June–October) from stations with records of 20 or more years. In each recording site, automatic and manual data quality control were performed to verify the consistency of the daily precipitation data. We believe that our highly dense precipitation dataset will be useful for climate, trend and extreme events analysis. Additionally, the data will allow validating simulations of numerical atmospheric models. The dataset is public, and it was previously used in other research to determine areas susceptible to flooding due to heavy rain events and to develop a web mapping application of daily precipitation data.