CHELSA (Climatologies at high resolution for the earth’s land surface areas) is a very high resolution (30 arc sec, ~1km) global downscaled climate data set currently hosted by the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL. It is built to provide free access to high resolution climate data for research and application, and is constantly updated and refined.
It includes climate layers for various time periods and variables, ranging from the Last Glacial Maximum, to the present, to several future scenarios.
CHELSA is based on a mechanistical terrain-based downscaling of global reanalysis data or global circulation model output and is freely available in the download section.
Current work based on CHELSA:
Karger, D. N., Lange, S., Hari, C., Reyer, C. P. O., Conrad, O., Zimmermann, N. E., & Frieler, K. (2023). CHELSA-W5E5: Daily 1km meteorological forcing data for climate impact studies. Earth System Science Data, 15(6), 2445–2464. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-2445-2023
Brun, P., Zimmermann, N.E., Hari, C., Pellissier, L., Karger, D.N. (preprint): Global climate-related predictors at kilometre resolution for the past and future. Earth System Science Data doi.org/10.5194/essd-2022-212
Karger, D.N., Wilson, A.M., Mahony, C., Zimmermann, N.E., Jetz, W. (2021): Global daily 1km land surface precipitation based on cloud cover-informed downscaling. Scientific Data. doi.org/10.1038/s41597-021-01084-6
Karger, D.N., Schmatz, D., Detttling, D., Zimmermann, N.E. (2020): High resolution monthly precipitation and temperature timeseries for the period 2006-2100. Scientific Data. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-00587-y
The data can be downloaded here: