Soil moisture can greatly influence the ecosystem but is hard to monitor at the global scale. By calibrating and combining 11 different products derived from satellite observation, we developed a new global surface soil moisture dataset spanning from 2003 to 2018 with high accuracy. Using this new dataset, not only can the global long-term trends be derived, but also the seasonal variation and spatial distribution of surface soil moisture at different latitudes can be better studied.

Representations of the atmospheric boundary layer over sea ice are a challenge for numerical weather prediction models. To increase our understanding of the relevant processes, a field campaign was carried out over the sea ice in the Baltic Sea from 27 February to 2 March 2020. Observations included 27 unmanned aerial vehicle flights, four photogrammetry missions, and shore-based automatic weather station and lidar wind measurements. The dataset obtained is used to validate model results.

Thermohaline staircases are stepped structures in the ocean that contain enhanced diapycnal salt and heat transport. In this study, we present a global dataset of thermohaline staircases derived from 487 493 observations of Argo profiling floats and Ice-Tethered Profilers using a novel detection algorithm.

We propose a hierarchical principle for remotely sensed urban land use and land cover change for mapping intra-urban structure and component dynamics. China’s Land Use/cover Dataset (CLUD) is updated, delineating the imperviousness and green surface conditions in cities from 2000 to 2018. The newly developed datasets can be used to enhance our understanding of urbanization impacts on ecological and regional climatic conditions and on urban dwellers' environments.

The Soil Map of Estonia is the most detailed and information-rich dataset for soils in Estonia. But its information is not immediately usable for analyses or modelling. We derived parameters including soil layering, soil texture (clay, silt, and sand content), coarse fragments, and rock content and aggregated and predicted physical variables related to water and carbon cycles (bulk density, hydraulic conductivity, organic carbon content, available water capacity).

Earth's gravity field provides invaluable insights into the state and changing nature of our planet. GOCO06s combines over 1 billion measurements from 19 satellites to produce a global gravity field model. The combination of different observation principles allows us to exploit the strengths of each satellite mission and provide a high-quality data set for Earth and climate sciences.

Fine-grained geospatial data on the spatial distribution of human settlements are scarce prior to the era of remote-sensing-based Earth observation. In this paper, we present datasets derived from a large, novel building stock database, enabling the spatially explicit analysis of 200 years of land development in the United States at an unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution. These datasets greatly facilitate long-term studies of socio-environmental systems in the conterminous USA.

This paper provides an overview of measurements collected in south-central Colorado (USA) during the 2018 LAPSE-RATE campaign. The measurements described in this article were collected by mobile surface vehicles, including cars, trucks, and vans, and include measurements of thermodynamic quantities (e.g., temperature, humidity, pressure) and winds. These measurements can be used to study the evolution of the atmospheric boundary layer at a high-elevation site under a variety of conditions.

During the last interglacial (130 to 115 ka), global sea level was higher than present. The World Atlas of Last Interglacial Shorelines (WALIS) has been created to document this. In this paper, we have compiled data for southeastern South America. There are landforms that indicate that sea level was 5 to 25 m higher than present during this time period. However, the quality of these data is hampered by limitations on elevation measurements, chronology, and geological descriptions.

We developed a shipborne variant of a remote sensing spectrometer for direct sunlight measurements of column-averaged atmospheric mixing ratios of carbon dioxide, methane, and carbon monoxide. The instrument was deployed on the research vessel Sonne during a longitudinal transect over the Pacific during June 2019. The campaign yielded more than 32 000 observations which compare excellently to atmospheric composition data from a state-of-the-art model (CAMS) and satellite observations (TROPOMI).