This is an input dataset for a modeling framework that quantifies 21st-century climate change impacts on early-marine fish growth potential along the central U.S. west coast using juvenile Chinook salmon as a case-study species. We use the Temperature and Krill values in this dataset in the upcoming publication "Projected 21st century shifts in fish growth potential in the California Current Ecosystem." Three Earth system models (IPSL-CM5A-MR, HadGEM2-ES, and GFDL-ESM2M) from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5 (CMIP5) were dynamically downscaled to produce regional climate and lower trophic-level (ending at the large zooplankter krill) projections at 10 km resolution for the broader CCE region under the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) high emissions scenario. These 10km projections were then further nested into a gridded 3 km resolution ROMS-NEMUCSC domain for the central CCE to produce a more detailed representation of nearshore processes impacting juvenile salmon growth in coastal waters. The temperature variable is included as "temp," and the krill variable is included as "pzooplankton." These are gridded files, so the other variables are those associated with the grid structure of the Temperature and Krill variables.