CHELSA – Free climate data at high resolution

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 statistical 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., 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

Karger, D.N., Lange, S., Hari, C., Reyer, C. P. O., Zimmermann, N.E. (2021): CHELSA-W5E5 v1.0: W5E5 v1.0 downscaled with CHELSA v2.0. ISIMIP Repository. https://doi.org/10.48364/ISIMIP.836809

The data can be downloaded here:

Download