IPCC Climate Zones

This repository contains raster and vector data files for the IPCC Climate Zones according to the 2019 definitions outlined in the 2019 Refinement to the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories pages 3.47 and 3.48, updated with these ammendments, in addition to the code to create these files. The climate data is sourced from the Climatic Research Unit (University of East Anglia) and Met Office, where the CRU TS Version 4.09 dataset is used.

Raster data as a GeoTIFF and netCDF, and vector data as a geoJSON data can be downloaded directly from the data directory. Otherwise, the following steps will recreate these files from the source climate data.

Usage

1. Setup the environment

   • This package assumes Astral UV is installed and Python 3.11 is available.
   • Create the virtual environment and install dependencies with uv venv

2. Download the CRU climate data

   • Run uv run download.py
   • This will download approximately 6.4 GB of data to the data directory. The data is downloaded in 10-year chunks for the parameters: potential evapotranspiration (pet), mean temperature (tmp), precipitation (pre), and frost days (frs).

3. Create the climate zones

   • Run uv run create_climate_zones.py. This aggregates the climate data and applies the classification logic.
   • Output files for raster ipcc_climate_zones.nc and vector ipcc_climate_zones.geojson files are written to the data directory, as well as a PNG image ipcc_climate_zones.png visualizing the climate zones.

Optionally, the included elevation data data/elevation_0.5deg can be updated or replaced. This is only necessary if higher quality or resolution data is required. The data was created by:

• Manually downloading 10km elevation from Earth Env to the data directory
• Running uv run regrid_elevation.py to regrid the elevation data to match the climate data