Updated historical (1750–2023) trends of reactive gases and aerosols from the Community Earth atmospheric Data System (CEDS)

Abstract. Estimates of anthropogenic air pollutants and reactive gases remain essential for air quality, weather and other earth systems modeling. Here we present an updated historical time series (1750–2023) produced by the Community Earth atmospheric Data System (CEDS), version CEDS v_2025_03_18, which is widely used in national and international models and modeling exercises. This dataset provides historical estimates of anthropogenic chemically reactive atmospheric gases (carbon monoxide – CO, methane – CH₄, ammonia – NH₃, nitrous oxides – NO_X, sulfur dioxide – SO₂, and non-methane volatile orgaic compounds – NMVOCs), carbonaceous aerosols (black carbon – BC, and organic carbon – OC), as well as carbon dioxide – CO₂ and nitrogen dioxide – N₂O. Aggregate annual estimates are available by 220 countries, 62 sectors, and 8 fuels (in addition to process emissions). Gridded data are available for 9 final gridding sectors with monthly seasonality and VOC speciation in netcdf v4 (HDFv5) format with CF-compliant metadata at 0.5-degree resolution for the full time series and downscaled to 0.1 degree from 1980 forward.