The newly updated WorldClim now provides the spatially-downscaled (2.5 minutes) and bias-corrected (using WorldClim 2.1) monthly historical climatology (maximum temperature, minimum temperature, and precipitation) from 1960-2018 in GeoTIFF format. Click here to view the resource.

If you’re comfortable coding in R, here is a code, written by Aniruddha Ghosh (Alliance Bioversity-CIAT), that you can use to extract the 2017 and 2018 monthly rainfall data, for example, for Burkina Faso specifically. The code below will generate these two GeoTIFF files.

library(raster)
outdir <- tempdir() # Specify your preferred working directory

# Downloading and unzipping
url <- "http://biogeo.ucdavis.edu/data/worldclim/v2.1/hist/wc2.1_2.5m_prec_2010-2018.zip"
zip <- file.path(outdir, basename(url))
 
# 3 GB download!
download.file(url, zip, mode = "wb")
f <- unzip(zip, list = TRUE)

# Only unzip 2017 and 2018
j <- grep("2017|2018", f$Name, value = TRUE)
ff <- unzip(zip, files = j, exdir = outdir)

# Yearly data
f1 <- grep("2017", ff, value = TRUE)
f2 <- grep("2018", ff, value = TRUE)
r1 <- stack(f1)
r2 <- stack(f2)

# Crop, mask, save by Burkina Faso boundary
v <- getData("GADM", country = "BFA", level = 0, path = outdir) 
r1 <- crop(r1, v)
r2 <- crop(r2, v)

# Each file has 12 bands (1:January ... 12:December)
r1 <- mask(r1, v, filename = file.path(outdir, "BFA_2017_prec.tif"))
r2 <- mask(r2, v, filename = file.path(outdir, "BFA_2018_prec.tif"))

Other community members also provided following suggestions:

For the rainfall (until 2016) you can download on the ReSAKSS eAtlas platform. You can access this way: 1) Select Burkina Faso, 2) Click on the analytics button on the orange banner at the top of the page, 3) Select Biophysics, then Annual precipitation, and 4) At the bottom of the new page you have a download button to extract yearly averages at a national level, or the whole dataset with yearly averages for specific province in Burkina Faso.

Racine Ly (IFPRI)

TerraClimate is also available from 1958 to 2018. You can download netCDF files for individual variables and years from here. It is also available at GEE data catalog here.

Khaled Al-Sham’aa (ICARDA)