This paper describes an assembled dataset containing measurements of certain trace substances in the ocean, their distributions, and evolution with time. These substances, called tracers, result from a combination of natural and artificial processes, and their distribution and evolution provide important clues about ocean circulation, mixing, and ventilation. In addition, they give information about the global hydrologic cycle and volcanic and hydrothermal processes.

Meteorological, snow survey, streamflow, and groundwater data are presented from Marmot Creek Research Basin, a small alpine-montane forest headwater catchment in the Alberta Rockies. It was heavily instrumented, experimented upon, and operated by several federal government agencies between 1962 and 1986 and was re-established starting in 2004 by the University of Saskatchewan Centre for Hydrology. These long-term legacy data serve to advance our knowledge of hydrology of the Canadian Rockies.

The scientific community uses numerical models to predict future atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases causing global warming. This study presents the history of atmospheric concentration of the major greenhouse gases over the last 2000 years measured in ice core bubbles from the site of Law Dome (East Antarctica). The associated dataset is useful to test climate models and help provide accurate predictions of future climate change.

The Sentinel-2 satellite mission allows the observation of the land surface at unprecedented resolutions (20 m every 5 days). The frequency of observations can be further increased with Landsat-8. Here we describe a new collection of snow maps made from Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 and evaluate their accuracy. The data are routinely produced over several mountain areas and freely distributed via http://theia.cnes.fr. These new data could unlock advances in our understanding of mountain ecosystems.

The expected sea level rise by the year 2100 will determine an adaptation of the whole coastal system and the land retreat of the shoreline. Future scenarios coupled with the improvement of mining technologies will favour increased exploitation of sand deposits for nourishment. This work summarises a large data set of geophysical and sedimentological data that maps the spatial features of submerged sand deposits and is a useful tool in future climate change scenarios.

Natural and human-ignited fires affect all major biomes, and satellite observations provide evidence for rapid changes in global fire activity. The Global Fire Atlas of individual fire size, duration, speed, and direction is the first global data product on individual fire behavior. Moving towards a global understanding of individual fire behavior is a critical next step in fire research, required to understand how global fire regimes are changing in response to land management and climate.

The paper highlights the data contained in the database for the Prairie research site, St. Denis National Wildlife Research Area, at Saskatchewan, Canada. The database includes atmosphere, snow surveys, pond, soil, groundwater, and water isotopes collected on an intermittent basis between 1968 and 2018. The metadata table provides location information, information about the full range of measurements carried out on each parameter, and GPS locations relevant for interpretation of the data.

In this article we try to make the broad geoscience community and especially the seismological community aware of the availability of earthquake source mechanisms in the Bulletin of the International Seismological Centre (ISC) and encourage researchers to make use of this data set in future research. Moreover, we acknowledge the data providers, and we encourage others to routinely submit their source mechanism solutions to the ISC.

This dataset provides a collection of 10 cm resolution orthomosaics and digital elevation models of the Gornergletscher glacial system (Switzerland). Raw data have been acquired every 2 weeks by intensive UAV surveys and cover the summer 2017. A careful photogrammetric processing ensures the geometrical coherence of the whole dataset.

REMdb was created in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident (1986) by the European Commission. Since then it has been maintained with the aim to keep a historical record of the Chernobyl accident and to store the radioactivity monitoring data gathered through the national environmental monitoring programs of the European Union member states. To date, the total number of data records stored in REMdb exceeds 5 million, in this way providing a valuable archive for everyone.

The completeness of global radiosonde humidity observations taken over time is studied based on IGRA data. The study illustrates how the number of long-term time series depends on the required frequency, continuity, and vertical sampling of data, in addition to record length. Furthermore, a dataset with metadata related to IGRA is described. It is hoped that such metadata will help climate and environmental scientists to find the most complete in situ observations meeting their research needs.

We compute monthly solutions of changes in relative sea level, geoid height, and vertical bedrock displacement and uncertainties therein for the period April 2002–August 2016. These are based on the Release-06 GRACE Level-2 Stokes coefficients distributed by three premier data processing centers: CSR, GFZ, and JPL. Solutions are provided with and without Earth's rotational feedback included and in both the center-of-mass and center-of-figure reference frames.

ICGEM is a non-profit scientific service that contributes to any research area in which the use of gravity information is essential. ICGEM offers the largest collection of global gravity field models, interactive calculation and visualisation services and delivers high-quality datasets to researchers and students in geodesy, geophysics, glaciology, hydrology, oceanography, and climatology and most importantly general public. Static, temporal, and topographic gravity field models are available.

The leaf area index of Sahelian rangelands was measured between 2005 and 2017 in northern Mali. These observations collected over more than a decade, in a remote and not very accessible region, provide a relevant and unique data set that can be used for a better understanding of the Sahelian vegetation response to the current rainfall changes. The collected data can also be used for satellite product evaluation and land surface model validation.

We address the question of the global characterization of fossil fuel CO₂ emission hotspots that may cause coherent XCO₂ plumes in space-borne CO₂ images, based on the ODIAC global high-resolution 1 km fossil fuel emission data product. For space imagery with 0.5 ppm precision for a single XCO₂ measurement, a total of 11 314 hotspots are identified, covering 72 % of the global emissions. These hotspots define the targets for the purpose of monitoring fossil fuel CO₂ emissions from space.

Soil moisture is a key variable in our Earth system. Knowledge of soil moisture and its dynamics across scales is vital for many applications such as the prediction of agricultural yields or irrigation demands, flood and drought monitoring, weather forecasting and climate modelling. To date, the ESA CCI SM products are the only consistent long-term multi-satellite soil moisture data sets available. This paper reviews the evolution of these products and their underlying merging methodology.

Processes occurring at the earth's surface (erosion, dust formation, weathering) determine the evolution of the landscape and play an important role in the global climate. The present database (compiled from a literature search) helps to determine the neodymium and strontium radioisotope signature of terrestrial and marine sediments to determine their provenance as well as present and past sediment transport pathways to oceanic basins.

Thanks to near-surface sea temperatures measured at Trieste, northern Adriatic Sea, from 1899 to 2015, we estimated mean daily temperatures at 2 m depth and built a quasi-homogeneous 117-year-long time series. We describe the instruments used and the sites of measurements, which are all within Trieste harbour. The data set represents a valuable tool to study sea temperature variability on different timescales. A mean temperature rise rate of 1.1 ± 0.3 °C per century was estimated.

We have produced an open and reproducible estimate of Greenland Ice Sheet solid ice discharge from 1986 through 2017. Our results show three modes at the total ice-sheet scale: steady discharge from 1986 through 2000, increasing discharge from 2000 through 2005, and steady discharge from 2005 through 2017. The behavior of individual sectors and glaciers is more complicated. This work was done to provide a 100 % reproducible estimate to help constrain mass balance and sea-level rise estimates.

Soil moisture and precipitation have been monitored in the Brightwater Creek basin, east of Kenaston, Saskatchewan, since 2007. Soil moisture, soil temperature, and precipitation data from the 35+ stations, from 2007 to 2017, are presented, along with processing details. Data from the network are used for remote-sensing validation and calibration and, in conjunction with other instruments within the network, hydrological model validation.

Robust estimates of runoff, snow, and evaporation rely on high-quality estimates of incoming solar and thermal radiation at the surface and near surface humidity. Taking advantage of the physical soundness of a numerical weather reanalysis and the preciseness and spatial resolution of a national gridded temperature data set, new estimates of these variables are presented for Norway. Further, existing data sets and observations are compared, emphasizing daily correlation, trends, and gradients.

This study describes the generation of a classification and the global spatially explicit mapping of six crop-specific tillage systems for around the year 2005. Tillage practices differ by the kind of equipment used, soil surface and depth affected, timing, and their purpose within the cropping systems. The identified tillage systems including a downscale algorithm of national Conservation Agriculture area values were allocated to crop-specific cropland areas with a resolution of 5 arcmin.

This study describes a 2-month dataset of ground-based, vertically pointing triple-frequency cloud radar observations recorded during the winter season 2015/2016 in Jülich, Germany. Intensive quality control has been applied to the unique long-term dataset, which allows the multifrequency signatures of ice and snow particles to be statistically analyzed for the first time. The analysis includes, for example, aggregation and its dependence on cloud temperature, riming, and onset of melting.

This paper describes long-term meteorological and evaluation datasets from 10 reference sites for use in snow modelling. We demonstrate how data sharing is crucial to the identification of errors and how the publication of these datasets contributes to good practice, consistency, and reproducibility in geosciences. The ease of use, availability, and quality of the datasets will help model developers quantify and reduce model uncertainties and errors.

We generated a long-term (1985–2015) and medium-resolution (30 m) product of phenology indicators in urban domains in the conterminous US using Landsat satellite observations. The derived phenology indicators agree well with in situ observations and provide more spatial details in complex urban areas compared to the existing coarse resolution phenology products (e.g., MODIS). The published data are of great use for urban phenology studies (e.g., pollen-induced respiratory allergies).

During summer 2014 and summer 2015 two autonomous underwater vehicles were operated over several months in the western Nordic Seas close to the ice edge. They took measurements of temperature, salinity and water depth (pressure) on the way. The aim of the Seaglider missions was to observe if near-surface freshwater, which flows out of the Arctic Ocean in the direction to the North Atlantic, increased with shrinking ice coverage. The measurements were executed to finally provide validated data.

High-resolution measurements of maritime clouds are relatively scarce. Airborne cloud radar, microwave radiometer and dropsonde observations are used to expand these data. The measurements are unified into one data set to enable easy joint analyses of several or all instruments together to gain insight into cloud properties and atmospheric state. The data set contains measurements from four campaigns between December 2013 and October 2016 over the tropical and midlatitude Atlantic.