CHELSA-TraCE21k – high-resolution (1 km) downscaled transient temperature and precipitation data since the Last Glacial Maximum

High-resolution, downscaled climate model data are used in a wide variety of applications across environmental sciences. Here we introduce a new, high-resolution dataset, CHELSA-TraCE21k. It is obtained by downscaling TraCE-21k data, using the “Climatologies at high resolution for the earth's land surface areas” (CHELSA) V1.2 algorithm with the objective to create global monthly climatologies for temperature and precipitation at 30 arcsec spatial resolution in 100-year time steps for the last 21 000 years. Paleo-orography at high spatial resolution and for each time step is created by combining high-resolution information on glacial cover from current and Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) glacier databases and interpolations using data from a global model of glacial isostasy (ICE-6G_C) and a coupling to mean annual temperatures from TraCE21k (Transient Climate Evolution of the last 21 000 years) based on the Community Climate System Model version 3 (CCSM3). Based on the reconstructed paleo-orography, mean annual temperature and precipitation were downscaled using the CHELSA V1.2 algorithm. The data were validated by comparisons with the glacial extent of the Laurentide ice sheet based on expert delineations, proxy data from Greenland ice cores, historical climate data from meteorological stations, and a dynamic simulation of species distributions throughout the Holocene. Validations show that the CHELSA-TraCE21k V1.0 dataset reasonably represents the distribution of temperature and precipitation through time at an unprecedented 1 km spatial resolution, and simulations based on the data are capable of detecting known LGM refugia of species.