Maxar's High-Resolution (1 km) Foundational Climate Data: a Daily-Updated, Multi-Timescale, Global Blended Climate Forecast

The need to understand and assess the range of potential climate conditions, whether it be three weeks or thirty years in the future, is critical for businesses and other stakeholders to plan for adequate climate response and resiliency. It is difficult, however, for even the most weather-savvy stakeholders to sort through and manage the sheer volume of intersecting time periods, spatial resolutions, and ensemble outputs available from multiple climate models from disparate sources. Additionally, the coarse spatial resolution of these models (1 degree or greater) and susceptibility of climate forecasts to biases make bias-correction and downscaling an imperative. The resulting spatial resolution must properly capture climatic variations due to topography and complex coastlines in order to enable users to fully prepare for and manage the climate risk exposure of specific assets.

This presentation introduces Maxar’s high-resolution (1 km) foundational climate data suite, which addresses these needs by blending a spectrum of sub-seasonal, seasonal, decadal, and centennial scale climate models into one unified ensemble and then downscaling that ensemble to 1 km resolution. The core parameters, including precipitation, 10 m wind speed, and 2 m temperature, are derived using the Climatologies at High resolution for the Earth’s Land Surface Areas (CHELSA) and the land component of the fifth generation of European ReAnalysis (ERA5-Land) climatologies and are available over any land-based area of interest globally. The product suite is updated daily and provides probabilistic guidance for stakeholders at a spatiotemporal resolution where climate impacts can be more fully resolved. Here we outline the key methods used to bias correct and downscale the native model output to 1 km resolution and present an evaluation of the foundational climate data’s performance, specifically focusing on the influences of the underlying complex topography at a 1 km scale.