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chelsa-nex

Overview

This repository provides a reproducible workflow for building bias‑corrected climate scenarios from the NASA NEX-GDDP-CMIP6 archive accessed via Google Earth Engine. The pipeline downloads (ERA5-Land) or aggregates (CHELSA‑W5E5) reference reanalysis data, computes area‑weighted summaries for glacier polygons, and applies scaled distribution mapping to the CMIP6 ensemble. Outputs include daily precipitation and temperature time series that can feed MATILDA or other downstream hydrological models.

The workflow is currently tailored to individual glaciers identified by the Randolph Glacier Inventory v6 (RGI) and is designed to download, preprocess, and bias adjust climate data for those outlines (e.g., to force GloGEM or other glacier models). Batch jobs iterate over one or more RGI‑labeled glacier polygons, either as a single file or a directory of GeoPackages, and produce ready‑to‑use forcing for glacier modeling.

Key components

  • main.py: Batch entry point that loops over GeoPackage inputs, prepares single‑polygon extracts, and executes the full CMIP6 workflow via ClimateScenarios.
  • matilda_functions.py: Hosts the CMIP6 downloader, bias‑correction routines, and visualization helpers used by the workflow, including generation of GloGEM‑compatible climate forcing files (.dat) (GloGEM reference).
  • era5l_preprocessing.py: Utilities to fetch ERA5‑Land daily means from Google Earth Engine (dataset description: ECMWF/ERA5‑Land (daily raw)) for each polygon (single download or parallel yearly batches).
  • chelsa_preprocessing.py: Aggregates CHELSA‑W5E5 NetCDF tiles to polygon means for precipitation, temperature, and other variables. CHELSA‑W5E5 is not hosted in GEE; download the NetCDF tiles separately from the ISIMIP repository before running the aggregation (Karger et al. 2022, CHELSA‑W5E5 DOI).
  • GCM_filter.py: Helper to limit the CMIP6 ensemble to a preferred set of global climate models.

Prerequisites

  • Python (see chelsa_packages.txt for suggested packages).
  • Access to Google Earth Engine with a configured project for downloading ERA5‑Land and CMIP6 data.
  • GeoPackage (.gpkg) files containing polygons with an RGIId column. The batch routine processes either a single GeoPackage file or every GeoPackage inside a directory; each row in the default layer is treated as one polygon. Polygon names are derived from the RGIId field (RGI-<id>), so non‑RGI identifiers are not currently supported in the batch workflow.

Data sources

  • NEX‑GDDP‑CMIP6: Accessed via Google Earth Engine (dataset description).
  • ERA5‑Land: Downloaded directly from Google Earth Engine (dataset description).
  • CHELSA‑W5E5: Download the NetCDF tiles separately from ISIMIP before running aggregation. Cite as: Dirk N. Karger, Stefan Lange, Chantal Hari, Christopher P.O. Reyer, Niklaus E. Zimmermann (2022): CHELSA‑W5E5 v1.0: W5E5 v1.0 downscaled with CHELSA v2.0. ISIMIP Repository. DOI link.

Configuration

All runtime settings live in config.ini:

  • [settings]
    • geopackage_dir or batch_dir CLI flag: folder with input GeoPackages (or a single file).
    • reanalysis: choose era5l or chelsa as the reference dataset.
    • era5l_dir / chelsa_dir: where ERA5‑Land or CHELSA outputs are stored.
    • output_dir: destination for bias‑corrected CMIP6 CSVs and plots.
    • gee_project: Earth Engine project ID used for downloads.
    • start_year / end_year: time window for CMIP6 extraction.
    • processes: number of parallel workers for downloads and bias correction.
    • download, load_backup, plots, force_preprocessing: toggles controlling whether to fetch data, reuse cached files, render diagnostics, or re‑aggregate inputs.
  • [reanalysis]
    • chelsa_base_dir, chelsa_target_dir, chelsa_vars: location and variables to aggregate when using CHELSA‑W5E5.
    • convert_temperatures: convert Kelvin to Celsius for reanalysis products.

Update paths and toggles to match your environment before running the workflow.

Usage

  1. Prepare your polygon GeoPackages and set the desired parameters in config.ini. The batch processor accepts a single GeoPackage or a directory of GeoPackages. It reads the default layer from each file and iterates over all rows, so ensure the layer you want to process is set as the default and contains an RGIId column.
  2. Authenticate with Google Earth Engine (earthengine authenticate) if you have not initialized the CLI before.
  3. Run the batch processor: 
    python main.py --batch_dir /path/to/gpkg_folder
    • If --batch_dir is omitted, geopackage_dir from config.ini is used.
    • The script will create temporary single‑polygon GeoPackages in /tmp, download or aggregate reference data, and save bias‑corrected CMIP6 outputs to output_dir.

Running individual preprocessing steps

  • ERA5‑Land only: 
    python -c "from era5l_preprocessing import ERA5LPolygonDownloader; \
ERA5LPolygonDownloader('poly.gpkg', 'gee-project', './era5l', True).download_era5l()"
  • CHELSA‑W5E5 aggregation only: 
    python -c "from chelsa_preprocessing import chelsa_w5e5_agg; \
chelsa_w5e5_agg('poly.gpkg', force=True)"

Outputs

  • era5l_<polygon>.csv or aggregated CHELSA CSVs: reference reanalysis time series per polygon.
  • RGI-<id>_<var>.csv: bias‑corrected CMIP6 daily series for each variable and polygon in output_dir.
  • RGI-<id>_matilda.dat: GloGEM/MATILDA‑ready climate forcing files produced during CMIP6 bias correction when enabled.
  • Optional plot files illustrating bias correction performance when plots = True.