IPCC Climate Zones

from the 2019 Refinement to the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories

Matthew Lewis

2022-11-08

Description

These data (re)create spatial data for the IPCC Climate Zones, provided in Figure 3A.5.1 of Chapter 3: Consistent Representation of Lands in Volume 4: Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use of the 2019 Refinement to the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories.

Resolution: 0.5 arc degree

CRS: lon/lat WGS 84

Methods

The data were derived using the classification scheme shown in Figure 3A.5.2 based on the gridded Climate Research Unit (CRU) Time Series (TS) monthly climate data (Harris et al., 2014) for the period from 1985 to 2015 following the methods described in Annex 3A.5 Default climate and soil classifications of the above Chapter. All data were processed in R version 4.2.1, with the packages elevatr (v0.4.2), lubridate (v1.8.0), magrittr (v2.0.3), and terra (v1.6-7) attached. The full session info is included as a .txt file. As these methods are not exhaustively described in the Annex, the following assumptions were made:

• CRU TS3.25 was used as the most recently published data (published on 2017-09-22) that could have been incorporated into the Refinement. Other possibilities include CRU TS3.24 (which are the first data to include 2015), or CRU TS4.00 or CRU TS4.01 (both of which were published in parallel to 3.24 and 3.25). These data were all investigated, and CRU TS3.25 produced results that were the most visually similar to the published Figure 3A.5.1 (though non-identical).
• As the methods did not mention a preferred elevation data source, the elevatr R package was used to obtain data at zoom level 2 (approx resolution of 0.15 arc degree), that was then resampled to match the 0.5-degree resolution of the CRU data. These data originally come from the ETOPO1 global relief model.

Known discrepancies

• The distribution of Tropical Wet and Tropical Moist in South America does not exactly match the original data.
• There are small discrepancies in Tropical Montane classifications (likely arising from the use of a different elevation layer). These are most noticeable in, but not restricted to, Africa.
• The classification of Boreal Dry, Polar Dry, and Polar Moist in northern Russia and (to a lesser extent) in northern Canada does not exactly match the original data.
• There are a small number of Cool Temperate Dry pixels in the UK which do not occur in the original data.

Disclaimer

I am not affiliated with the IPCC in any way, I just needed spatial data of the Climate Zones, and could not readily identify any online. This is a problem which has previously been noted by ESDAC, who produced a spatial version of Figure 3A.5.1 from the original 2006 guidelines.

File description

• README.html - ~this description file.
• IPCC_Climate_Zones_ts_3.25.tif - the output Climate Zones map at 0.5-arc degree resolution based on the CRU TS3.25 data.
• IPCC_Climate_Zones_colour_map.clr - a colour map file to render the output map with the same colours as in the IPCC 2019 Refinement figure.
• IPCC_Climate_Zones_ts_3.25.png - an image file of the output Climate Zones map.
• ipcc_climate_zones_2019.R - the script used to produce these data.
• session_info.txt - the R session info.

License

CC-BY-4.0