A very High-resolution Climate Dataset for a High-altitude Region in Southern Spain: Sierra Nevada (HighResClimNevada)

High mountain regions are characterized by a high spatiotemporal variability in their climatic variables. Unfortunately, in these regions there is a lack of climatic information, mainly due to its difficult accessibility, and if any, it is usually short, sparse, or incomplete with numerous gaps and outliers. Sierra Nevada (SN), located in the southern Iberian Peninsula (IP), constitutes a double hot spot as it is a mountain region located in the Mediterranean, both of which are particularly vulnerable to climate change.

To investigate the impact of climate change on mountainous ecosystems in SN, a high-resolution dataset for this region, HighResClimNevada, was created for the period from 2001 to 2020. For this purpose, the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model version 4.3.3 driven by ERA5 reanalysis was used as convection permitting model (CPM) with a two “one-way” configuration to achieve simulated climatic fields over SN with 1 km spatial resolution. Because SN is topographically complex, the parent domain (d01) was configured spanned the entire IP with 5 km spatial resolution, while the nested domain (d02) was centered in SN but covered the entire Andalusia region. Maximum and minimum temperatures, precipitation, wind speed, solar incoming radiation, relative humidity, and surface pressure available are available in HighResClimNevada.

HighResClimNevada has been evaluated in terms of precipitation and maximum and minimum temperatures using bioclimatic and extreme indices, which are of special interest for ecologists and botanists. For this evaluation, we compared climatic fields from HighResClimNevada to observational gridded products from different sources (i.e., station-based products, satellite, and reanalysis), but also with in-situ weather stations located in the study region. In general, results indicate that HighResClimNevada has a good ability to represent the general climate characteristics in SN, making it a very useful tool for studying climate, its impact, and trends in this complex region.

Data availability: HighResClimNevada is available on the World Data Center for Climate (WDCC) at DKRZ (https://doi.org/10.26050/WDCC/HighresolClimNevada_eval).

Acknowledgements: This research has been carried out in the framework of the projects PID2021-126401OB-I00, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER Una manera de hacer Europa, LifeWatch-2019-10-UGR-01 co-funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation through the FEDER funds from the Spanish Pluriregional Operational Program 2014–2020 (POPE) LifeWatch-ERIC action line, and the project P20_00035 funded by FEDER/Junta de Andalucía-Consejería de Transformación Económica, Industria, Conocimiento y Universidades.