Min temperature of coldest month — 1981-2010 (CHELSA)
This layer maps the minimum temperature of the coldest month for the recent reference period 1981–2010.
Category: Physical risks · Mitigating services · Climate Chronic Risks · 1981-2010 Coverage: Global Format: Raster grid (~2 km) Used in risk analysis: No (contextual layer; not used in materiality scoring)
What it shows
This layer maps the minimum temperature of the coldest month for the recent reference period 1981–2010. It describes the typical seasonal cold extreme a location experiences, which matters for nature-related risk because winter cold limits which species, crops and ecosystems can survive in a place and sets a baseline for frost and cold-stress exposure.
How it is built
The layer is taken from the CHELSA-CMIP6 v2.1 bioclimatic dataset (Karger et al.). CHELSA produces high-resolution global climate surfaces by statistically downscaling climate data with corrections for terrain and atmospheric processes, giving a more realistic representation of mountain and coastal climates than coarse global models. This surface is the 1981–2010 reference climatology — an observed-period baseline against which future projections can be compared — provided globally at roughly 2 km grid spacing.
How to read it
Higher (less negative) values indicate milder winters; lower (more negative) values indicate colder seasonal minima and greater frost exposure. The layer is a baseline climatology, so it is most useful as the reference point for comparison with the matching SSP3-7.0 2071–2100 projection, where the difference between the two shows how much winter cold extremes are projected to shift.
Source
CHELSA-CMIP6 v2.1 bioclimatic layer (Karger et al.), minimum temperature of the coldest month, 1981–2010 reference climatology. Open licence.
Comparison with the WWF Risk Filter Suite
This bioclimatic baseline has no separate equivalent in the WWF Risk Filter Suite. CHELSA climate layers describe underlying climatic conditions rather than a packaged WWF risk indicator; WWF does not publish bioclimatic temperature surfaces as distinct dimensions. It should be treated as a Darwin climate-context extension that underpins, rather than maps onto, a specific WWF indicator.
Legend
Symbolised field: Min temperature of coldest month
Generated from darwin/layers/layer-chelsa-tasmin_coldestmonth-historical.toml and risk_indicator_pairs.toml (develop).