A full description of the data and the methods was published in March, 2010 in the article Globally Downscaled Climate Projections for Assessing the Conservation Impacts of Climate Change.
Data Format
These datasets are global, downscaled 20th and 21st century climate simulations from the CMIP3 multi-model archive.
We debias the 21st-century simulations with respect to their mean differences from 20th-century observations. These differences or “anomalies” are downscaled to 10 minute resolution with a spline interpolation and then added to 10 minute, mean 20th century climatologies of CRU CL2.0.
The dataset ranges from -180 to 180 longitude and -90 to 90 latitude. Projection is a generic Geographic with datum WGS84.
Twelve months of ArcASCII files are bundled in each zip file.
File Names
Each ASCII file has a naming convention associated to the dataset properties. Naming convention is as follows: vyyYYmmss(s)MMM, where:
- v is either p for precipitation or t for temperature.
- yyYY is the two digit year at the start of the mean climate period followed by the two digit year at the end of the mean climate period.
- Valid periods are 6190 for 20th century mean from 1961-1990, 4160 for projected mean 2041-2060 and 8100 for projected mean 2081-2100
- mm is the two digit month
- ss(s) is the two or three character scenario code ie 20c, a1b, b1 or a2
- MMM is the three character model code.
The following table has model names and associated codes. For more information about model acronyms and detailed model descriptions go to the IPCC Data Distribution Center.
| Model Name | Code |
|---|---|
| BCCR BCM2 | bc2 |
| CCCMA CGCM3_1-T47 | t47 |
| CCCMA CGCM3_1-T63 | t63 |
| CNRM CM3 | cm3 |
| CSIRO mk3_0 | m30 |
| CSIRO mk3_5 | m35 |
| GFDL CM2 | cm2 |
| GFDL CM2_1 | c21 |
| INGV ECHAM4 | eh4 |
| INM CM3 | im3 |
| IPSL CM4 | cm4 |
| LASG IAP fgoals_1g | f1g |
| NASA GISS_AOM | aom |
| NASA Model-EH | meh |
| NASA Model-ER | mer |
| MIUB CONS ECHO G | ecg |
| MPIM ECHAM5 | eh5 |
| MRI CGCM2_3_2a | c23 |
| NCAR CCSM3 | cs3 |
| NCAR PCM1 | pc1 |
| NIES miroc3_2 hires | 32h |
| NIES miroc3_2 medres | 32m |
| UKMO HADCM3 | hd3 |
| UKMO HADGEM1 | hg1 |
An example filename is p619001a1bcm1.asc. This file is mean January precipitation for period 1961-1990, scenario a1b and model bcc_cm1.
Units
- temp = average monthly temperature (°C * 10)
- prec = average monthly precipitation (mm)
Data Citation
Tabor, K. and J.W. Williams (2010). Globally downscaled climate projections for assessing the conservation impacts of climate change. Ecological Applications 20(2):554-565.
We acknowledge the modeling groups, the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Inter-comparison (PCMDI) and the WCRP’s Working Group on Coupled Modeling (WGCM) for their roles in making available the WCRP CMIP3 multi-model dataset. Support of this dataset is provided by the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy.