CHELSA

CHELSA (Climatologies at high resolution for the earth’s land surface areas) is a very high resolution (30 arcsec, ~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.

About the data

Characteristic	Description
Function	Displays daily climate datasets
Variable	Listed below
Geographic coverage	Global 90N-90S, 180W-180E
Spatial resolution	1-km at equator
Temporal resolution	daily
Format	netCDF
Unit	See list below

List datasets

CHELSA provides daily timeseries, monthly timeseries, Bioclimate/Köppen-Geiger, Future and Paleo Climate data. To support current project, GOST utilise daily timeseries temperature data from CHELSA-W5E5.

CHELSA-W5E5 v1.0

CHELSA-W5E5 dataset covers the entire globe at 30 arcsec horizontal and daily temporal resolution from 1979 to 2016. Variables (with short names and units in brackets) included in the CHELSA-W5E5 dataset are:

Name	Description	Units
pr	Daily Mean Precipitation	kg m-2 s-1
rsds	Daily Mean Surface Downwelling Shortwave Radiation	W m-2
tas	Daily Mean Near-Surface Air Temperature	K
tasmin	Daily Minimum Near Surface Air Temperature	K
tasmax	Daily Maximum Near Surface Air Temperature	K
orog	Surface Altitude	m
mask	the CHELSA-W5E5 land-sea mask	1

Data access

Individual monthly download link: https://data.isimip.org/10.48364/ISIMIP.836809.

Daily min and max temperature also available at DEC S3: s3://wbgdecinternal-ntl/climate/data/chelsa.