TerraClimate: Monthly Climate and Climatic Water Balance for Global Terrestrial Surfaces, University of Idaho

Dataset Availability: 1958-01-01T00:00:00Z–2023-12-01T00:00:00Z
Dataset Provider: University of California Merced
Earth Engine Snippet: ee.ImageCollection("IDAHO_EPSCOR/TERRACLIMATE")
Tags: climate drought evapotranspiration geophysical global merced monthly palmer pdsi precipitation runoff temperature vapor wind

Description

TerraClimate is a dataset of monthly climate and climatic water balance for global terrestrial surfaces. It uses climatically aided interpolation, combining high-spatial resolution climatological normals from the WorldClim dataset, with coarser spatial resolution, but time-varying data from CRU Ts4.0 and the Japanese 55-year Reanalysis (JRA55). Conceptually, the procedure applies interpolated time-varying anomalies from CRU Ts4.0/JRA55 to the high-spatial resolution climatology of WorldClim to create a high-spatial resolution dataset that covers a broader temporal record.

Temporal information is inherited from CRU Ts4.0 for most global land surfaces for temperature, precipitation, and vapor pressure. However, JRA55 data is used for regions where CRU data had zero climate stations contributing (including all of Antarctica, and parts of Africa, South America, and scattered islands). For primary climate variables of temperature, vapor pressure, and precipitation, the University of Idaho provides additional data on the number of stations (between 0 and 8) that contributed to the CRU Ts4.0 data used by TerraClimate. JRA55 was used exclusively for solar radiation and wind speeds.

TerraClimate additionally produces monthly surface water balance datasets using a water balance model that incorporates reference evapotranspiration, precipitation, temperature, and interpolated plant extractable soil water capacity. A modified Thornthwaite-Mather climatic water-balance model and extractable soil water storage capacity data was used at a 0.5° grid from Wang-Erlandsson et al. (2016).

Data Limitations:

Long-term trends in data are inherited from parent datasets. TerraClimate should not be used directly for independent assessments of trends.
TerraClimate will not capture temporal variability at finer scales than parent datasets and thus is not able to capture variability in orographic precipitation ratios and inversions.
The water balance model is very simple and does not account for heterogeneity in vegetation types or their physiological response to changing environmental conditions.
Limited validation in data-sparse regions (e.g., Antarctica).

Bands

Resolution
4638.3 meters

Bands

Name	Units	Min	Max	Scale	Description
`aet`	mm	0*	3140*	0.1	Actual evapotranspiration, derived using a one-dimensional soil water balance model
`def`	mm	0*	4548*	0.1	Climate water deficit, derived using a one-dimensional soil water balance model
`pdsi`		-4317*	3418*	0.01	Palmer Drought Severity Index
`pet`	mm	0*	4548*	0.1	Reference evapotranspiration (ASCE Penman-Montieth)
`pr`	mm	0*	7245*		Precipitation accumulation
`ro`	mm	0*	12560*		Runoff, derived using a one-dimensional soil water balance model
`soil`	mm	0*	8882*	0.1	Soil moisture, derived using a one-dimensional soil water balance model
`srad`	W/m^2	0*	5477*	0.1	Downward surface shortwave radiation
`swe`	mm	0*	32767*		Snow water equivalent, derived using a one-dimensional soil water balance model
`tmmn`	°C	-770*	387*	0.1	Minimum temperature
`tmmx`	°C	-670*	576*	0.1	Maximum temperature
`vap`	kPa	0*	14749*	0.001	Vapor pressure
`vpd`	kPa	0*	1113*	0.01	Vapor pressure deficit
`vs`	m/s	0*	2923*	0.01	Wind-speed at 10m

* estimated min or max value

Image Properties

Image Properties

Name	Type	Description
status	STRING	'provisional' or 'permanent'

Terms of Use

Terms of Use

The data set is in the public domain as licensed under the Creative Commons Public Domain (CC0) license.

Citations

Abatzoglou, J.T., S.Z. Dobrowski, S.A. Parks, K.C. Hegewisch, 2018, Terraclimate, a high-resolution global dataset of monthly climate and climatic water balance from 1958-2015, Scientific Data 5:170191, doi:10.1038/sdata.2017.191

Explore with Earth Engine

Code Editor (JavaScript)

var dataset = ee.ImageCollection('IDAHO_EPSCOR/TERRACLIMATE')
                  .filter(ee.Filter.date('2017-07-01', '2017-08-01'));
var maximumTemperature = dataset.select('tmmx');
var maximumTemperatureVis = {
  min: -300.0,
  max: 300.0,
  palette: [
    '1a3678', '2955bc', '5699ff', '8dbae9', 'acd1ff', 'caebff', 'e5f9ff',
    'fdffb4', 'ffe6a2', 'ffc969', 'ffa12d', 'ff7c1f', 'ca531a', 'ff0000',
    'ab0000'
  ],
};
Map.setCenter(71.72, 52.48, 3);
Map.addLayer(maximumTemperature, maximumTemperatureVis, 'Maximum Temperature');

Python setup

See the Python Environment page for information on the Python API and using geemap for interactive development.

import ee
import geemap.core as geemap

Colab (Python)

dataset = ee.ImageCollection('IDAHO_EPSCOR/TERRACLIMATE').filter(
    ee.Filter.date('2017-07-01', '2017-08-01')
)
maximum_temperature = dataset.select('tmmx')
maximum_temperature_vis = {
    'min': -300.0,
    'max': 300.0,
    'palette': [
        '1a3678',
        '2955bc',
        '5699ff',
        '8dbae9',
        'acd1ff',
        'caebff',
        'e5f9ff',
        'fdffb4',
        'ffe6a2',
        'ffc969',
        'ffa12d',
        'ff7c1f',
        'ca531a',
        'ff0000',
        'ab0000',
    ],
}

m = geemap.Map()
m.set_center(71.72, 52.48, 3)
m.add_layer(
    maximum_temperature, maximum_temperature_vis, 'Maximum Temperature'
)
m

Open in Code Editor

TerraClimate: Monthly Climate and Climatic Water Balance for Global Terrestrial Surfaces, University of Idaho

IDAHO_EPSCOR/TERRACLIMATE, climate,drought,evapotranspiration,geophysical,global,merced,monthly,palmer,pdsi,precipitation,runoff,temperature,vapor,wind

1958-01-01T00:00:00Z/2023-12-01T00:00:00Z

Google Earth Engine

https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets