CMIP6 future climate monthly timeseries

Question

I am very new to working with future climate datasets. I would like to know if future climate data (total precipitation and min-max temperature) from CMIP6 are available as monthly timeseries. For example, I would like total precipitation and temperature data for each month of the years between 2022 and 2040. Popular sites such as Chelsa and Worldclim host downscaled future data as monthly averages for select intervals of time (e.g. 12 files representing each of the 12 months between 2022 - 2040). Presumably these were created by averaging data available for individual months? Are there other options to access downscaled future climate timeseries data? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Future climate projections sources

The goto solution for accessing climate projections data is the ESGF network, for instance you will be able to find and download CMIP6 projections from this page (and CMIP5 here, Cordex here, etc.).

Alternatively, Copernicus Climate Datastore may be more user friendly but is less exhaustive. See this page for CMIP6.

In both cases the data are available as NetCDF, using them may require some effort if you are not familiar with this format.

How (not) to use these data

The use and interpretation of these data is not straightforward. In particular, you should definitely not download one dataset, select a year and month and consider the result as a forecast for that period.

Among other issues:

1. Projections, ie: a simulation of a possible state of the atmosphere at a given point in the future, are not previsions
2. They are plenty of climate models and they can yield different results even for similar emissions pathways, it is risky to pick just one
3. Climate projections are generally biased and will need to be adjusted before use

You can find in-depth tutorials on how to use climate projections for local impact assessment using Python here. Copernicus also offers free training and online courses.

Answer 2

I'm not sure that SO is the correct platform for this question, but for what it is worth, the copernicus climate data store has a lot of the core CMIP5 and CMIP6 output at monthly or daily temporal resolutions.

Here is the direct link to CMIP6

The nice thing about this site is that if you are already using the API to access other data such as ERA5, it is very quick and easy to grab CMIP data too - it downloads as a zip file of netcdf files.