CHELSAcruts is a delta change monthly climate dataset for the years 1901-2016 for mean monthly maximum temperatures, mean monthly minimum temperatures, and monthly precipitation sum. Here we use the delta change method by B-spline interpolation of anomalies (deltas) of the CRU TS 4.01 dataset. Anomalies were interpolated between all CRU TS grid cells and are then added (for temperature variables) or multiplied (in case of precipitation) to high resolution climate data from CHELSA V1.2 (Karger et al. 2017, Scientific Data). This method has the assumption that climate only varies on the scale of the coarser (CRU TS) dataset, and the spatial pattern (from CHELSA) is consistent over time. This is certainly a rather crude assumption, and for time periods for which more accurate data is available CHELSAcruts should be avoided if possible (e.g. use CHELSA V1.2 for 1979-2015). Different to CHELSA V1.2, CHELSAcruts does not take changing wind patterns, or temperature lapse rates into account, but rather expects them to be constant over time, and similar to the long term averages. CHELSAcruts is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license.