This ESSD special issue addresses a need in the atmospheric chemistry and air quality modelling community for improved, detailed state-of-the-art, and high-resolution global and regional surface emission inventories. Surface emissions are used as input in chemistry transport models (CTMs) for air quality modelling, as well as in chemistry climate models which simulate atmospheric chemistry interactions and feedbacks (e.g. radiative direct and non-direct effects). Up-to-date and accurate estimates of these emissions, including as much spatial and temporal detail as possible, are necessary to drive these model simulations which are the basis for climate change assessment and mitigation strategies.

This initiative arises out of several concerted efforts within the atmospheric chemistry community to bring together such datasets. For example, CAMS_81, a funded project of the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service, is responsible for providing consistent and up-to-date global and regional emissions datasets that are used by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast's chemical forecasting models and by many other CTMs within the CAMS systems. All contributions of original and openly available anthropogenic and natural surface emission datasets which support and promote research aimed towards understanding their impact on air quality and climate are welcome. Submissions are also encouraged from emission datasets that are constructed using alternative methods such as inverse modelling of satellite-derived atmospheric chemical concentrations. For the review process, contributors are encouraged to submit a representative subset of their data product for referees to browse their data without downloading the entire dataset. If possible, for consistency we ask that this data subset focus on the season DJF 2014/2015, although it is not a requirement.

Authors are invited to submit their data set(s) to the ECCAD (Emissions of atmospheric Compounds and Compilation of Ancillary Data) data repository ( https://eccad.aeris-data.fr/).

The development of the CAMS datasets included in this special issue has been funded by the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, which is operated by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts on behalf of the European Commission as part of the Copernicus programme (http://copernicus.eu/).