units for input data

[gxiang304]

I am new to this python package. Does anyone have an idea about what units are used for precipitation, temperature, and PET (if suppled as an input) to calculate various drought indices? Thanks.

[lukruh]

I did not find clear info on this in the docs. However, the source code and example data give some hints. It looks like precipitation, awc and pet is expected to be inches (monthly) for the palmer indices. For the SP(E)I I don't see any requirements for the input. In theory every unit should work as long as its used for both PR and PET. For monthly accumulated units I see a problem of leap years impacting the distribution for February (at least in theory).
This are just guesses, maybe it helps you getting started. But I'd wait for a more sophisticated answer, before doing any serious science with this.

[gxiang304]

Thanks for the reply. I was trying to look at the example input files (https://github.com/monocongo/example_climate_indices/tree/master/example/input).
The data can be downloaded but cannot be viewed using "ncdump" (since they are nc files). The xlsx file cannot be
opened either.

[meklit-y]

The unit for precip for the example nclimgrid_lowres_prcp.nc file is in mm.