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.
Comment Policy
Comments are not taken at this time.
Please Note: The Climate Data Guide generally does not distribute data sets. It is your responsibility to find and process the data that you need. Except in unusual circumstances, we do not respond to inquries such as, "Please provide me with monthly gridded rainfall data for sub-equatorial South America for 1994-2012 in netCDF format." If... 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
Feedback is being gathered through various channels. We are not taking feedback from the general public at this time.
Information about contributing guidance on data sets to this website is available here.
Unfortunately, we are not funded to provide data that is customized for your specific research project.
Links to download data are found under the ‘Get Data’ tab on our data set pages.... more