Years of Record: 1999/12 to 2012/11
The Arctic System Reanalysis is a multi-agency, university-led retrospective analysis (reanalysis) of the Greater Arctic. ASR is produced using high-resolution versions of the Polar Weather Forecast Model (PWRF) and the WRF-VAR and High Resolution Land Data Assimilation (HRLDAS) data assimilation...
Main variables and Earth System components:
Formats: netCDF
Timestep: Sub-daily,Monthly
Domain: Arctic 
Years of Record: 1799/12 to 2012/08
Annual net land-atmosphere carbon flux and net flux of carbon to the atmosphere due to land-use and land-use change (LULUC) are estimated using an integrated assessment model and three historical reconstructions of land use and land use conversion. The data span 1800-2010 and are aggregated for...
Main variables and Earth System components:
Formats: binary
Timestep: Annual
Domain: Global
See Expert Guidance by Meiyappan, Prasanth
The International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme (IGBP) defines ecosystems surface classifications. The CERES (Clouds and Earth's Radiant Energy System)10-minute data can be used to derive the land categories. Other, finer resolution gridded surface data are available.
Main variables and Earth System components:
Formats: netCDF | binary
Timestep: Climatology
Domain: Global Years of Record: 1948/12 to 2006/11
The Coordinated Ocean Research Experiments version 2 (COREv2) data set consists of a globally complete set of air-sea fluxes of momentum, heat and freshwater for 1948-2009 at monthly resolution. This data set serves as a set of common atmospheric boundary conditions that has been used...
Main variables and Earth System components:
Formats: netCDF
Timestep: Monthly
Domain: Global
Atmosphere | Evaporation | Precipitation | Radiation | Wind Stress | Land | Runoff and Streamflow | Ocean | Surface Flux
See Expert Guidance by Yeager, Stephen
Years of Record: 1900/12 to 2002/11
Maps of the monthly self-calibrating Palmer drought severity index (SCPDSI) have been calculated for the period 1901–2002 for the contiguous United States (20°–50°N and 130°–60°W) and Europe (35°–70°N, 10°W–60°E) with a spatial resolution of 0.5° × 0.5°
Formats: ascii
Timestep: Monthly
Domain: Europe, North America 
Years of Record: -0001/12 to 2005/11
Tree-ring drought atlases provide a paleoclimate analog to modern drought indices, most commonly the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI). Produced on a regular lat-lon grid for regions such as North America, Europe, and Australia, these centuries-long datasets are convenient for comparisons...
Formats: netCDF | ascii
Timestep: Annual
Domain: North America
See Expert Guidance by Cook, Edward
"FLUXNET is a global network of micrometeorological flux measurement sites that measure the exchanges of carbon dioxide, water vapor, and energy between the biosphere and atmosphere. At present over 140 sites are operating on a long-term and continuous basis. Vegetation under study includes...
Formats: netCDF | ascii
Timestep: Sub-daily
Domain: Global 
Years of Record: 1981/12 to 2007/11
Global, spatially and temporally explicit estimates of carbon and water fluxes derived from empirical up-scaling eddy covariance measurements would constitute a new and possibly powerful data stream to study the variability of the global terrestrial carbon and water cycle. Jung et al (2009)
Main variables and Earth System components:
Formats: binary
Timestep: Monthly
Domain: Global Years of Record: 1947/12 to 2004/11
"A dataset of historical monthly streamflow at the farthest downstream stations for the world’s 925 largest ocean-reaching rivers has been created for community use. Compared with previous studies, the new dataset has improved homogeneity and enables more reliable assessments of decadal and long-...
Main variables and Earth System components:
Formats: netCDF | ascii | binary
Timestep: Monthly
Domain: Global 
Years of Record: 1950/12 to 2014/01
GHCNDEX provides gridded, station-based indices of temperature- and precipitation- related climate extremes. It is intended for climate change detection and attribution studies, climate model evaluation, and operational monitoring of extreme climatic events. Twenty-six indices, including daily...
Main variables and Earth System components:
Formats: netCDF | ascii
Timestep: Monthly
Domain: Global This data set contains a global (excluding Antarctica) 1 km map of permafrost zonation. It is an estimate of to what degree permafrost exists in a region nearly everywhere, or only in the most favorable conditions. These local conditions affecting permafrost occurrence will partly exhibit regional...
Main variables and Earth System components:
Formats: binary | KML
Timestep: Climatology
Domain: Global
See Expert Guidance by Gruber, Stephan
Years of Record: 2001/12 to 2012/08
The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) refers to a pair of NASA satellites that has flown in low-Earth orbit since 2002. The satellites use a precise microwave ranging system to measure the distance between themselves due to gravitational acceleration. Onboard GPS instruments determine...
Main variables and Earth System components:
Formats: netCDF | ascii
Timestep: Daily,Monthly
Domain: Global
Cryosphere | Glaciers | Ice Sheet Mass | Land | Groundwater | Water Storage | surface water | Ocean | Bottom pressure
See Expert Guidance by Swenson, Sean
Years of Record: 1900/12 to 2010/11
HadEX2 provides gridded, station-based indices of temperature- and precipitation- related climate extremes. It is intended for climate change detection and attribution studies and climate model evaluation. Twenty-nine indices, including daily maximum and minimum temperatures, number of frost days,...
Main variables and Earth System components:
Formats: netCDF | ascii
Timestep: Monthly,Annual
Domain: Global Years of Record: 1799/12 to 2010/11
A set of three estimates of land-cover types and annual transformations of land use are provided on a global 0.5°x0.5° grid at annual timesteps. The longest of the three estimates spans 1770-2010. The three estimates use three different data sets of cropland and pastureland. Common input data...
Main variables and Earth System components:
Formats: netCDF
Timestep: Annual
Domain: Global
See Expert Guidance by Meiyappan, Prasanth
Years of Record: 1971/12 to 2013/08
"The Landsat Program provides the longest continuous space-based record of Earth’s land in existence. Since 1972, Landsat satellites have collected measurements of Earth’s continents and surrounding coastal regions that have enabled people to study forests, food production, water and land use,...
Main variables and Earth System components:
Timestep: Sub-daily
Domain: Global Years of Record: 1978/12 to 2011/08
A global data set of the frozen state of the land surface (free-thaw (FT) status) has been developed spanning 1979-present at a daily timestep and 25 x 25 km spatial resolution. Based on passive microwave remote sensing, the FT parameter is closely related to the surface energy budget, hydrologic...
Main variables and Earth System components:
Formats: binary | GeoTIFF | HDF
Timestep: Daily
Domain: Global
See Expert Guidance by Kimball, John
Years of Record: 1997/12 to 2010/11
This data set summarizes the original observation-based mean fluxes of Water and Energy Budget (WEB) components during the first decade of the 21st century (specifically: 1998-2010), for each continent and ocean basin. These data are summarized on both monthly and annual scales, as well as...
Main variables and Earth System components:
Formats: netCDF | ascii | Spreadsheet
Timestep: Climatology,Monthly,Annual
Domain: Africa, Antarctic, Asia, Atlantic Ocean, Australia, Europe, Indian Ocean, Maritime Continent, North America, South America Years of Record: 1978/12 to 2021/09
A high resolution (32km x 29 pressure levels) data set focused upon the North American Region. Relative to the NCEP-DOE (R2) it has a much improved land-hydrology, diurnal cycle and land-atmosphere interaction. As such, it can be considered a second generation reanalysis. A unique feature is the...
Main variables and Earth System components:
Formats: GRIB
Timestep: Climatology,Sub-daily,Monthly
Domain: North America 
Years of Record: 2002/01 to 2018/02
MODIS vegetation indices, produced on 16-day and monthly intervals and at multiple spatial resolutions, provide consistent spatial and temporal comparisons of vegetation canopy greenness, a composite property of leaf area, chlorophyll and canopy structure. Two vegetation indices are derived from...
Main variables and Earth System components:
Formats: HDF-EOS
Timestep: Daily,Monthly,Weekly
Domain: Global 
Years of Record: 1981/05 to 2018/02
Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) values are derived from surface reflectance data acquired by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensor. By applying knowledge gathered over time about instrument performance and sensor characteristics, the data are reprocessed to...
Main variables and Earth System components:
Formats: netCDF | GeoTIFF
Timestep: Daily
Domain: Global 
The Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) uses readily available temperature and precipitation data to estimate relative dryness. It is a standardized index that generally spans -10 (dry) to +10 (wet). Maps of operational agencies like NOAA typically show a range of -4 to +4, but more extreme values...
Formats: netCDF | ascii | binary
Timestep: Monthly
Domain: Global
See Expert Guidance by Dai, Aiguo
The circumpolar permafrost and ground ice data contribute to a unified international data set that depicts the distribution and properties of permafrost and ground ice in the Northern Hemisphere (20°N to 90°N). The re-gridded data set shows discontinuous, sporadic, or isolated permafrost boundaries.
Main variables and Earth System components:
Formats: binary | shapefile
Timestep: Climatology
Domain: NH - Northern Hemisphere The Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI) is a global data base of glacier outlines. It is intended for estimates of ice volume and glacier mass at regional and global scales. The data are organized into 19 large regions, with a shapefile provided for each region. The RGI is produced as part of the...
Main variables and Earth System components:
Formats: shapefile
Timestep: Climatology
Domain: Global 
Years of Record: 1966/09 to 2020/09
The Snow Cover Extent Climate Data Record extends from the late 1960s to present. Historical analyses based on visual inspection have been digitized and combined with modern multi-spectral remote sensing to produce a seamless record on a hemispheric scale. The data are available at weekly and...
Main variables and Earth System components:
Formats: netCDF | ascii
Timestep: Monthly,Weekly
Domain: North America
See Expert Guidance by Estilow, Thomas W. | See Expert Guidance by Robinson, David
Years of Record: 2019/08
Soil moisture is a state variable of the land that crosses the interfaces of several disciplines, including meteorology, hydrology, climatology and ecology. Soil moisture content controls the partitioning of net radiation at the land surface between sensible and latent heat fluxes. This occurs...
Main variables and Earth System components:
See Expert Guidance by Dirmeyer, Paul
Years of Record: 1948/12 to 2018/06
The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) is a widely used index to characterize meteorological drought on a range of timescales. On short timescales, the SPI is closely related to soil moisture, while at longer timescales, the SPI can be related to groundwater and reservoir storage. The SPI can...
Main variables and Earth System components:
Timestep: Monthly
See Expert Guidance by Keyantash, John
Years of Record: 1957/12 to 2018/11
TerraClimate is a global gridded dataset of meteorological and water balance variables for 1958-present, available on a monthly timestep. Its relatively fine spatial resolution, global extent, and long length are a unique combination that fills a void in climate data. TerraClimate combines...
Main variables and Earth System components:
Formats: netCDF
Timestep: Climatology,Monthly
Domain: Global
See Expert Guidance by Abatzoglou, John
Years of Record: 1909/12 to 2019/10
The U.S. Climate Extremes Index (CEI) was first presented in 1995 as a framework for quantifying observed changes in climate within the contiguous United States. At present, the CEI evaluates the percent area of extremes in the distribution of much above/below average (top/bottom 10% of...
Main variables and Earth System components:
Formats: ascii
Timestep: Monthly,Seasonal,Annual
Domain: North America
See Expert Guidance by Gleason, Karin
Combines observed river discharge information with a climate-driven Water Balance Model in order to develop composite runoff fields that are consistent with observed discharges. This combination preserves the accuracy of discharge measurements as well as the spatial and temporal distribution of...
Main variables and Earth System components:
Formats: ascii
Timestep: Climatology
Domain: Global 