| 10 Feb 2026
GloWE-8D: a global long-term 8-day wind erosion dataset from 1982 to 2020
Abstract. Wind erosion constitutes a critical driver of global land degradation and dust emission, posing persistent threats to ecological security, agricultural production, and human health. Although regional-scale wind erosion assessments exist, there remains a lack of long-term, high spatiotemporal resolution, and publicly available global-scale wind erosion datasets, which has constrained a deeper understanding of its dynamic processes and driving mechanisms. Based on the Revised Wind Erosion Equation (RWEQ), this study constructed a global wind erosion dataset from 1982 to 2020 with an 8-day temporal resolution and a 0.05° spatial resolution. By introducing a residue factor scheme based on growing season identification, the characterization accuracy of wind erosion suppression during vegetation cover periods was enhanced, enabling a more refined depiction of episodic wind erosion features. The dataset revealed that the global annual average wind erosion total from 1982 to 2020 was 539.13 Pg, with severe erosion areas concentrated in the arid and semi-arid regions of the Northern Hemisphere. The wind erosion exhibited a slowly increasing trend, although with significant regional variations. Data validation demonstrated a high spatial consistency between this dataset and the MERRA-2 dust emission data (R2 = 0.79), and a significant temporal correlation with coarse-mode aerosol optical depth observations from AERONET stations. Furthermore, comparisons indicated that the results of this study were within the same order of magnitude and showed high correlation with existing regional research. As the first publicly available long-term, high spatiotemporal resolution global wind erosion data product, this dataset provides crucial data support for global and regional dust emission estimation, research on wind erosion process mechanisms, land degradation prevention, and climate change response. The dataset is publicly accessible at https://zenodo.org/records/18245214 (Zhang et al., 2026).
The authors have successfully constructed and made publicly available the long-term, high spatiotemporal resolution global wind erosion dataset, filling a critical gap in the field. The manuscript is well-written, logically structured, scientifically sound in its methodology, and thorough in its validation. The results are reliable and the discussion is insightful. The public availability of this dataset will provide invaluable support for research in wind erosion, dust cycles, land degradation, and climate change. Suggested to be published after revisions. The following are the questions and some mistakes in this manuscript: