The climate change data for the Belmont Project include two meteorological variables: the near surface air temperature (°C or K) and precipitation (mm). The temperature is in one of the three formats: maximum (Tmax), minimum (Tmin), or average (Tas). These data are based on three sources: the CMIP6 (https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/search/cmip6), the WorldClim (https://www.worldclim.org), and the CHELSA (Climatologies at high resolution for the earth’s land surface areas; https://chelsa-climate.org).
The CMIP6 products are generally at coarse resolutions of 50 – 150 km over the globe with multiple sampling frequencies, including monthly, daily, six hourly, and three hourly. The daily data are derived from the CMIP6 data bank for this project. The other two products are downscaled from a selection of CMIP6 model outputs to resolutions as fine as 30 arc seconds (approximately 1 km). However, these super high-resolution products only provide monthly mean variables for historical periods (1980 – 2018 for CHELSA at arc 30 seconds and 1961 – 2018 for WorldClim at 2.5 arc minutes) and monthly-mean climatologies, i.e., several 20-year (2021-2040, 2041-2060, 2061-2080, and 2081-2100 for WorldClim) or 30-year (2011-2040, 2041-2070, and 2071-2100 for CHELSA) averaged monthly means for future climate change under three greenhouse gas emission scenarios in terms of shared socio-economic pathways (SSP): SSP126, SSP370, and SSP585. Each of the high-resolution data is sliced for the two project-targeted regions: Côte d'Ivoire (9°W – 2°W; 4°N – 11°N; Figure 1)
and Brazil (74.5°W – 34°W; 34.5°S – 6°N; Figure 2). To reduce the size of each file, Brazil data are further divided into thirteen subregions (color patches with a name on each center in Figure 2):
The data sets are temporarily limited to project members. Please contact ping.liu@stonybrook.edu for the account name and password to download the data.
The data are in GeoTIFF format and can be converted to NetCDF or other formats. Each file can be accessed by clicking the following link (password restricted).