The share of cloudy days per cell at one kilometre, annually and for each month, with a per-governorate table of the cloudiest and clearest month, and the patches of the persistent Sarawat cloud belt (10 patches covering 2,491 km2 at a mean elevation of 1,965 m).
The national mean is 15.8% of days.
In short
The national mean is 15.8% of days cloudy, with a maximum cell of 75.9%.
The cloudiest and clearest governorates are listed in the table.
The Sarawat cloud belt covers 2,491 km2 at a mean elevation of 1,965 m.
Who it is for
Rain-fed agriculture and rangeland research, solar energy studies, geography and climate departments, ecotourism and aviation.
Method: what we add to the raw data
- The source is an open global cloud-frequency archive at one kilometre, built from twice-daily observation over fifteen years; each cell carries the share of days it was cloudy.
- The Saudi window was read partially from the global files rather than downloading each one, about eight hundred megabytes per month.
- Each governorate was averaged annually and monthly, and its cloudiest and clearest month and their difference extracted.
- The cloud belt is cells cloudy more than fifty percent of days, grouped into connected patches of at least 25 km2, with their elevation added from the elevation model.
Product details
| What you get | 2 spatial layers in GeoPackage, 2 GeoTIFF rasters, 3 CSV tables, lyrx and qml symbology for ArcGIS Pro and QGIS, a PNG map at 220 dpi, and an Arabic and English guide |
|---|---|
| Formats | GPKG, GeoTIFF, CSV, lyrx, qml, PNG |
| Coordinate system | WGS 84 (EPSG:4326) |
| Licence | Commercial use allowed for you and the organisation you buy for; no resale or redistribution |
| Delivery | A private download link valid for 24 hours, within 6 hours of payment confirmation |
| Package size | ZIP 69.2 MB |
| Personal data | The product contains no personal data |
Spatial layers
governorates_cloud— polygons, 121: Governorates with their cloud frequencycloud_belt— polygons, 10: Patches of the persistent cloud belt
Raster files (GeoTIFF)
D127_cloud_annual_pct.tif— 2,589 × 1,941, 1 km: Annual cloud frequencyD127_cloud_monthly_pct.tif— 2,589 × 1,941, 1 km: Monthly cloud frequency (twelve bands)
Tables
D127_governorates_cloud.csv— 121 rows: Cloud frequency per governorateD127_monthly_by_governorate.csv— 1,452 rows: Monthly frequency per governorateD127_cloud_belt.csv— 10 rows: Cloud belt patches table
Limitations
- The source records the presence of cloud, not rainfall: a cloud may pass without rain, so this product does not substitute for rainfall data.
- Observation is twice daily at roughly fixed times, so cloud that forms and clears between them is not fully represented, particularly afternoon convective cloud.
- The archive is a fifteen-year mean, so it describes no particular year and no temporal change can be read from it.
- Ground-touching fog may not be distinguished from low cloud when observed from above; cloudiness here includes both.
- A one-kilometre cell suits the scale of the Sarawat but does not separate a summit from a valley a few hundred metres away.
FAQ
- How long does delivery take?
- Up to 6 hours after payment is confirmed.
- How long does the download link last?
- 24 hours, and it is renewed free on request.
- Can I get a refund?
- Digital products are not refundable once downloaded — unless the file is defective or does not match the description, in which case it is replaced or fully refunded.
- What does the licence allow?
- Commercial use is allowed for you and the organisation you buy for; resale or redistribution is not.