ISIMIP3b population input data

This dataset contains the national and gridded historical population data for ISIMIP3b (Frieler et al. 2024, in prep.). Estimates are available for total as well as urban and rural population counts.
With version 1.1, we provide gridded population data, that is based on HYDE v3.3 (private communication with K. Klein Goldewijk, to be published) rescaled to the national population counts from the 2019 revision of the UN World Population Prospects (WPP) database (United Nations, 2019). Just like the original dataset we provide total, rural and urban population per grid cell. The data for the historical period is identical to the corresponding ISIMIP3a data, adjusted for the different start and end years.
Version 1.2 extends the national data to 1850. The additional years were derived from the gridded historic population map by means of the fractional ISIMIP country mask.
Note: Combining time series of the gridded population from ISIMIP3b with the historical gridded population data provided under ISIMIP3a needs to be done with caution: On the grid-cell level inconsistencies in the transition between the observational period and the projections (2015-2016) arise, due to differences in the spatial population distribution in HYDE v3.3 and the observational basis dataset (Gridded Population of the World version 3) used for the NCAR projections.