Data from: Climatologies at high resolution for the earth's land surface areas

High-resolution information on climatic conditions is essential to many
applications in environmental and ecological sciences. Here we present the
CHELSA (Climatologies at high resolution for the earth’s land surface
areas) data of downscaled model output temperature and precipitation
estimates of the ERA-Interim climatic reanalysis to a high resolution of
30 arc sec. The temperature algorithm is based on statistical downscaling
of atmospheric temperatures. The precipitation algorithm incorporates
orographic predictors including wind fields, valley exposition, and
boundary layer height, with a subsequent bias correction. The resulting
data consist of a monthly temperature and precipitation climatology for
the years 1979–2013. We compare the data derived from the CHELSA algorithm
with other standard gridded products and station data from the Global
Historical Climate Network. We compare the performance of the new
climatologies in species distribution modelling and show that we can
increase the accuracy of species range predictions. We further show that
CHELSA climatological data has a similar accuracy as other products for
temperature, but that its predictions of precipitation patterns are
better.