I am trying to use the precipitation and temperature max contextual variables (found here: IPUMS-DHS) and have a few questions.
From what I understand from the site is that the the full range of data is from 1981 to 2020 for precipitation and 1980 to 2016 for temperature. But the csv files available to download are organized so that for each DHSID there are values for precipitation (or temperature) for the 60 months before and 11 months after the survey begins. Not the full range of years.
Is there a version that you can get these weather data for each DHSID going back to 1980 or 1981, respectively?
And is tempmax_00 the temperature data for month the survey started for that country sample or the month that cluster was interviewed?
How should each value be interpreted? For example what does a value of tempmax_09 equal to 283.8299866 mean?
Please advise if I’ve misunderstood the dataset descriptions.