A high-resolution daily climate time series for Germany (1981-2100)
Abstract
The presented dataset is a high-resolution (1 × 1 km) daily climate time series for Germany covering the period 1981–2100 across a historic and nine CMIP5 climate change scenarios. The dataset is based on EURO—CORDEX projections from three Earth system models (ICHEC-EC-EARTH, MPI-M-ESM-LR, and NCC—NorESM1-M) under three representative concentration pathways (RCP 2.6, 4.5, and 8.5) and was bias-corrected against observational data from the German Weather Service (DWD). To reduce data volume in climate impact studies, the 355,944 1 × 1 km grid cells were aggregated into 10,000 spatial clusters based on multi-annual averages of five key variables for plant growth, specifically, temperature (minimum and maximum), precipitation, global radiation and vapor pressure deficit. The resulting dataset provides for each cluster nine daily climate time series of said variables until the end of the 21st century. The dataset is stored in SQLite databases and accompanied by a map relating representative climate clusters to the 1 km grid cells. To our knowledge, this is the first Germany-wide dataset that provides ready to use daily climate projections until 2100 at 1 km resolution with a climate-cluster representation that reduces computational demand, while keeping climatic variability.