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About the Climate Data Guide

The Climate Data Guide provides concise and reliable information on the strengths and limitations of the key observational data sets, tools and methods used to evaluate Earth system models and to understand the climate system.  Citable expert commentaries are authored by experienced data users and developers, enabling scientists to multiply the impacts of their work and the diverse user community to access and understand the essential data.

The Climate Data Guide was named an exemplary community resource by the 2012 U.S. National Academies' report, A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling, and is an element of the strategic plan for NCAR's Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory. NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, is located in Boulder, Colorado and is widely respected as a leading institution in the atmospheric and related sciences.

A peer-reviewed overview paper describing the project is available.

Benefits of Being a Registered User of the Climate Data Guide
Benefits of being a registered user: Make comments on any data set page Upload your work and commentary to be featured on this site Receive notifications of new content  Keep the Climate Data Guide in existence.  Registrations help us to better understand our audience, enabling us to design the resource around user needs.  The user metrics are also extremely important for making the case for... more
Comment Policy
We encourage constructive comments and interaction. Please remember these guidelines: Users agree to UCAR's Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. For this site, the comments are visible without logging in, but only registered and logged in users may post comments and replies. You may post questions about the dataset, share your experiences using the dataset, provide links to relevant resources, or... more
Contribute to the Climate Data Guide
The Climate Data Guide is a community-authored resource. The Guide will be a living repository for the climate community’s collective wisdom and expertise on a broad array of observational datasets and their appropriate use in analyses and model evaluation. For more about the effort and to reference it in your work, please see the open-access article: Schneider, D. P., C. Deser, J. Fasullo, and K... more
Principal Investigators, Funding and Staff
Sponsorship The Climate Data Guide is a project of the Climate Analysis Section (CAS), within the Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory (CGD) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, USA. The project was initiated under a competitively selected grant (1048899) from the National Science Foundation (NSF), and continues with support from NSF. Principal... more
Suggest/Contact
Do you have a pressing need for information on a particular variable or dataset? Please fill out the form and we will attempt to address your need. You may also use this form to provide general feedback on the website contact us with questions Information about contributing guidance on data sets to this website is available here. Please Note: The Climate Data Guide generally does not distribute... more