| 17 Jul 2025
The 2024 Release of the Global Heat Flow Database (GHFDB): Quality Assessment, Metadata Standards, and a Century of Geothermal Data
Abstract. The Global Heat Flow Database is a comprehensive data compilation on published heat-flow measurements dating back to the 1950s. The International Heat Flow Commission first released the database in 1963. Recent activities within the World Heat Flow Database Project (funded by the DFG German Research Association) and the Task Force VIII of the International Lithosphere Program (ILP) have focused on (1) developing a new, modern digital data infrastructure with integrated quality control of the data, (2) creating a new dedicated metadata scheme for reporting heat-flow data, (3) conducting a comprehensive review of the original literature to supplement the original metadata according to the new scheme, and (4) thoroughly adding new measurements from the literature. As a result, the 2024 release presents a substantial update, with the number of heat flow observations increasing from 58,302 data points in 2012 to 91,182 in 2024, while the number of literature sources simultaneously increased from 572 to 1,586 documents. A key part of this process was the introduction of a new, comprehensive metadata scheme and the development of the GHFDB Data Template, which facilitates the structured and detailed reporting of heat flow observations in accordance with the new scheme. The GHFDB Data Template captures methodological details, uncertainty estimates, and contextual information, forming the basis for a newly implemented, multi-dimensional quality-assessment system. The improved data submission workflow, now supported by the option of obtaining digital object identifier (DOI), making the newly submitted data citable in literature, as is increasingly required by journals. This service encourages direct contributions from researchers and ensures transparency, attribution, and long-term data stewardship by the partner repository GFZ Data Services. The new heat flow database release marks a significant step towards establishing a global, quality-assured data infrastructure and lays the foundation for more reliable, reusable, and interoperable heat-flow datasets across scientific disciplines.
Competing interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. However, Dr. Kirsten Elger is a member of the editorial board of the journal.
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