Robert Beyer, Mario Krapp , Andrea Manica

The variability of climate has profoundly impacted a wide range of macroecological processes in the Late Quaternary. Our understanding of these has greatly benefited from palaeoclimate simulations, however, high-quality reconstructions of ecologically relevant climatic variables have been limited to a few selected time periods, thus impeding continuous time analyses. Here, we present a 0.5° resolution bias-corrected dataset of global monthly temperature, precipitation, cloud cover, relative humidity and wind speed, 17 bioclimatic variables, net primary productivity and biomes covering the last 120,000 years at a temporal resolution of 1,000–2,000 years. The data are derived by combining medium-resolution HadCM3 climate simulations of the last 120,000 years with high-resolution HadAM3H simulations of the last 21,000 years and present-day observational data. Our approach allows for the temporal variability of small scale features while ensuring consistency with observed climate. The data show a good agreement with empirical reconstructions of temperature, precipitation and vegetation for the mid-Holocene, the Last Glacial Maximum and the Last Interglacial, performing equally well as existing high-resolution snapshot simulations of these time periods.