Bioclimatic and seasonal climate variables for Europe under eight SSP-RCP pathways, 1981–2100, 30 arc-seconds

Nineteen WorldClim bioclimatic variables and eight seasonal climate covariates for Europe at 30 arc second resolution (approximately 1 km), for a 1981–2010 baseline and all eight CMIP6 SSP-RCP pathways across three thirty-year future periods (2011–2040, 2041–2070, 2071–2100). Monthly fields from IPSL-CM6A-LR (variant r1i1p1f1) were downscaled onto the CHELSA V2.1 baseline climatology by the delta-change method. The set comprises 648 gridded fields sharing a single grid and land mask, covering 25° W to 45° E and 27° to 72° N on WGS84. The eight seasonal variables are additionally aggregated to the 1,345 NUTS3 regions of the domain for use in Ricardian analysis. Unlike the high-resolution bioclimatic products currently distributed, which cover three or four pathways, this dataset includes all eight — among them the most ambitious mitigation pathway (SSP1-1.9) and the overshoot pathway (SSP5-3.4-OS), the two in which the climate signal does not rise monotonically. Produced for the M.Sc. thesis “The Creation and Analysis of Bioclimatic Variables across Europe under SSP-RCP Scenarios”, Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg, 2026. The pipeline that generated it is archived separately; see Related works. Known limitations Change factors derive from a single model and a single ensemble member, so no uncertainty range attaches to any field and forced change cannot be separated from internal variability. IPSL-CM6A-LR sits at the upper end of the CMIP6 range of equilibrium climate sensitivity, so absolute magnitudes should be read as upper-side estimates; the ordering of pathways and the spatial and seasonal patterns are far less sensitive to that choice. Delta change shifts a distribution without reshaping it, so nothing here supports statistics of extreme events or any question turning on a change in variability. Three variables (BIO8, BIO9, BIO15) agree less closely with the reference product than the rest, for reasons written into their definitions. Required acknowledgementUsers must reproduce the CMIP6 acknowledgement: “We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme, which, through its Working Group on Coupled Modelling, coordinated and promoted CMIP6. We thank the climate modeling groups for producing and making available their model output, the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) for archiving the data and providing access, and the multiple funding agencies who support CMIP6 and ESGF.”