A four-decade global Lagrangian air-parcel trajectory dataset for atmospheric moisture and heat analysis

Abstract. Studying the pathways of atmospheric moisture and heat is crucial for understanding global water and energy cycles, and their response to climate change. Here, we present a new global dataset of atmospheric parcel trajectories generated with the FLEXible PARTicle dispersion model (FLEXPART v11) and forced by ERA5 reanalysis. The dataset spans 1979–2024 and provides a consistent and physically grounded record for studying Lagrangian moisture and heat transport. The dataset includes 20 million global, domain-filling air-parcel trajectories together with their (thermo)dynamic properties, enabling detailed investigation of long-range atmospheric transport processes. By providing the complete trajectory archive openly, the dataset enables quantitative analyses of moisture and heat pathways without the need to perform computationally expensive Lagrangian simulations. While the trajectory dataset itself can be used with any moisture and heat tracking attribution methodology, here it is explored using the new version of the Heat And MoiSture Tracking framEwoRk  (HAMSTER v2). The dataset’s usability is demonstrated by (i) global analyses of moisture source – sink patterns and recycling over multiple decades, (ii) global attribution of diabatic temperature increments to upwind surface sensible heat fluxes for a representative year (2021), and (iii) two local-scale case studies which showcase how the dataset and associated tools can be applied to hydrological and temperature extremes across a range of spatial and temporal scales. Overall, this resource lowers computational barriers and supports reproducible research across the atmospheric science community. The dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17952362 (Deman et al., 2025).