Climatologies at high resolution for the earth's land surface areas.

Abstract in brief

• This study introduces CHELSA, a high-resolution climate dataset for land areas worldwide, providing detailed monthly temperature and precipitation data from 1979 to 2013, created by downscaling the ERA-Interim reanalysis using advanced statistical methods.
• The temperature data is generated through statistical downscaling, while the precipitation data incorporates factors like wind, valley exposure, and boundary layer height to improve accuracy, especially in complex terrains.
• The CHELSA dataset performs as well as or better than other climate products in predicting temperature and especially improves precipitation pattern accuracy, which helps in applications like species distribution modeling by providing more precise climate information.]