CHELSA-TraCE21k data provides monthly climate data for temperature and precipitation at 30 arc-sec spatial resolution in 100-year time steps for the last 21,000 years. Palaeo-orography at high spatial resolution and at each time step is created by combining high resolution information on glacial cover from current and Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) glacier databases with the interpolation of a dynamic ice sheet model (ICE6G) and a coupling to mean annual temperatures from CCSM3-TraCE21k. Based on the reconstructed palaeo-orography, mean annual temperature and precipitation was downscaled using the CHELSA V1.2 algorithm.
Details
More details on the dataset are available on its dedicated website.
An alternative to downloading very large files is to use virtual rasters. Simply append "_vis" to the name of the dataset of interest (CHELSA_trace21k_1.0_0.5m_vsi). This is the recommended approach, and it is currently the only available version of the dataset.
IMPORTANT: If you use this dataset, make sure to cite the original publication:
Karger, D.N., Nobis, M.P., Normand, S., Graham, C.H., Zimmermann, N. (2023) CHELSA-TraCE21k – High resolution (1 km) downscaled transient temperature and precipitation data since the Last Glacial Maximum. Climate of the Past. doi:10.5194/cp-2021-30