Description: Ship- and island-based soundings from the 2016 El Niño Rapid Response (ENRR) field campaign Leslie M. Hartten, Christopher J. Cox, Paul E. Johnston, Daniel E. Wolfe, Scott Abbott, H. Alex McColl, Xiao-Wei Quan, and Matthew G. Winterkorn Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss., https//doi.org/10.5194/essd-2018-7,2018 Manuscript under review for ESSD (discussion: open, 1 comment) Radiosonde data collected during NOAA's El Niño Rapid Response Field Campaign in early 2016 have been reprocessed and lightly quality controlled. Temperature, humidity, and wind soundings from Kiritimati Island and the NOAA Ship Ronald H. Brown capture the repeated advance and retreat of the ITCZ at Kiritimati, a variety of marine tropospheric environments encountered by the ship, and lower-stratospheric features of the 2015–2016 QBO (quasi-biennial oscillation).

Description: Historical gridded reconstruction of potential evapotranspiration for the UK Maliko Tanguy, Christel Prudhomme, Katie Smith, and Jamie Hannaford Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss., https//doi.org/10.5194/essd-2017-137,2018 Manuscript under review for ESSD (discussion: open, 1 comment) Potential evapotranspiration (PET) is a necessary input data for most hydrological models, used to simulate river flows. To reconstruct PET prior to 1960s, simplified methods are needed because of lack of climate data required for complex methods. We have found that McGuinness-Bordne PET equation, which only needs temperature as input data, works best for the UK provided it is calibrated for local conditions. This method was used to produce a 5 km gridded PET dataset for the UK for 1891–2015.

Description: Spatial datasets of radionuclide contamination in the Ukrainian Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Valery Kashparov, Sviatoslav Levchuk, Marina Zhurba, Valentyn Protsak, Yuri Khomutinin, Nicholas A. Beresford, and Jacqueline S. Chaplow Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 10, 339-353, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-10-339-2018, 2018 Spatial datasets of radionuclide contamination in the Ukrainian Chernobyl Exclusion Zone describe data from analysis of samples collected by the Ukrainian Institute of Agricultural Radiology after the Chernobyl nuclear accident between May 1986 and 2014 at sites inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and other areas of interest. The data and supporting documentation are freely available from the Environmental Information Data Centre: https://doi.org/10.5285/782ec845-2135-4698-8881-b38823e533bf .

Description: Upscaled diurnal cycles of land-atmosphere fluxes: a new global half-hourly data product Paul Bodesheim, Martin Jung, Fabian Gans, Miguel D. Mahecha, and Markus Reichstein Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss., https//doi.org/10.5194/essd-2017-130,2018 Manuscript under review for ESSD (discussion: open, 1 comment) Interactions between the biosphere and the atmosphere can be well characterized by fluxes between the two. In particular, carbon and energy fluxes play a major role for understanding biogeochemical processes on ecosystem level or global scale. However, the fluxes can only be measured at individual sites by eddy covariance towers and an upscaling of these local observations is required to analyze global patterns. Previous work focused on upscaling monthly, eight-day, or daily average values and global maps for each flux have been provided accordingly. In this paper, we raise the upscaling of carbon and energy fluxes between land and atmosphere to the next level by increasing the temporal resolution to subdaily scales. We provide continuous half-hourly fluxes for the period from 2001 to 2014 at 0.5◦ spatial resolution, which allows for analyzing diurnal cycles globally. The dataset contains four fluxes: gross primary production (GPP), net ecosystem exchange (NEE), latent heat (LE), and sensible heat (H). We propose two prediction approaches for the diurnal cycles based on large-scale regression models and compare them in extensive cross-validation experiments using different sets of predictor variables. We analyze the results for a set of FLUXNET tower sites showing the suitability of our approaches for this upscaling task. Finally, we have selected one approach to calculate the global half- hourly data products based on predictor variables from remote sensing and meteorology at daily resolution as well as half-hourly potential radiation. In addition, we provide a derived product that only contains monthly average diurnal cycles, which is a lightweight version in terms of data storage that still enables to study the important characteristics of diurnal courses globally. We recommend to primarily use these monthly average diurnal cycles, because they are less affected by the impacts of day-to-day variation, observation noise, and short- term fluctuations on subdaily scales compared to the plain half-hourly flux products. The global half-hourly data products are available at https://doi.org/10.17871/BACI.224 .

Description: DamaGIS: a multisource geodatabase for collection of flood-related damage data Clotilde Saint-Martin, Pierre Javelle, and Freddy Vinet Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss., https//doi.org/10.5194/essd-2018-28,2018 Manuscript under review for ESSD (discussion: open, 2 comments) DamaGIS is a GIS database which aims to collect and assess flood-related damage data at the local scale. The reason for creating this database was the lack of precise damage data available to calibrate and validate flood risk assessment models. To this end, DamaGIS offers highly precise and easily accessible flood-related damage data. It uses multiple sources such as social networks. Since 2011, 729 damage caused by 23 flood events in the South of France have been reported within the database.

Description: Development and Analysis of Soil Water Infiltration Global Database Mehdi Rahmati, Lutz Weihermüller, Jan Vanderborght, Yakov A. Pachepsky, Lili Mao, Seyed Hamidreza Sadeghi, Niloofar Moosavi, Hossein Kheirfam, Carsten Montzka, Kris Van Looy, Brigitta Toth, Zeinab Hazbavi, Wafa Al Yamani, Ammar A. Albalasmeh, Ma'in Z. Alghzawi, Rafael Angulo-Jaramillo, Antônio Celso Dantas Antonino, George Arampatzis, Robson André Armindo, Hossein Asadi, Yazidhi Bamutaze, Jordi Batlle-Aguilar, Beatrice Bechet, Fabian Becker, Günter Blöschl, Klaus Bohne, Isabelle Braud, Clara Castellano, Artemi Cerdà, Maha Chalhoub, Rogerio Cichota, Milena Císlerová, Brent Clothier, Yves Coquet, Wim Cornelis, Corrado Corradini, Artur Paiva Coutinho, Muriel Bastista de Oliveira, José Ronaldo de Macedo, Matheus Fonseca Durães, Hojat Emami, Iraj Eskandari, Asghar Farajnia, Alessia Flammini, Nándor Fodor, Mamoun Gharaibeh, Mohamad Hossein Ghavimipanah, Teamrat A. Ghezzehei, Simone Giertz, Evangelos G Hatzigiannakis, Rainer Horn, Juan José Jiménez, Diederik Jacques, Saskia Deborah Keesstra, Hamid Kelishadi, Mahboobeh Kiani-Harchegani, Mehdi Kouselou, Madan Kumar Jha, Laurent Lassabatere, Xiaoyan Li, Mark A. Liebig, Lubomír Lichner, María Victoria López, Deepesh Machiwal, Dirk Mallants, Micael Stolben Mallmann, Jean Dalmo de Oliveira Marques, Miles R. Marshall, Jan Mertens, Félicien Meunier, Mohammad Hossein Mohammadi, Binayak P. Mohanty, Mansonia Pulido Moncada, Suzana Montenegro, Renato Morbidelli, David Moret-Fernández, Ali Akbar Moosavi, Mohammad Reza Mosaddeghi, Seyed Bahman Mousavi, Hasan Mozaffari, Kamal Nabiollahi, Mohammad Reza Neyshabouri, Marta Vasconcelos Ottoni, Theophilo Benedicto Ottoni Filho, Mohammad Reza Pahlavan Rad, Andreas Panagopoulos, Stephan Peth, Pierre-Emmanuel Peyneau, Tommaso Picciafuoco, Jean Poesen, Manuel Pulido, Dalvan José Reinert, Sabine Reinsch, Meisam Rezaei, Francis Parry Roberts, David Robinson, Jesús Rodrigo-Comino, Otto Corrêa Rotunno Filho, Tadaomi Saito, Hideki Suganuma, Carla Saltalippi, Renáta Sándor, Brigitta Schütt, Manuel Seeger, Nasrollah Sepehrnia, Ehsan Sharifi Moghaddam, Manoj Shukla, Shiraki Shutaro, Ricardo Sorando, Ajayi Asishana Stanley, Peter Strauss, Zhongbo Su, Ruhollah Taghizadeh-Mehrjardi, Encarnación Taguas, Wenceslau Geraldes Teixeira, Ali Reza Vaezi, Mehdi Vafakhah, Tomas Vogel, Iris Vogeler, Jana Votrubova, Steffen Werner, Thierry Winarski, Deniz Yilmaz, Michael H. Young, Steffen Zacharias, Yijian Zeng, Ying Zhao, Hong Zhao, and Harry Vereecken Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss., https//doi.org/10.5194/essd-2018-11,2018 Manuscript under review for ESSD (discussion: open, 0 comments) This paper presents and analyzes a global database of soil infiltration data, the SWIG database, for the first time. In total, 5023 infiltration curves were collected across all continents in the SWIG database. These data were either provided and quality checked by the scientists or they were digitized from published articles. We are convinced that the SWIG database will allow for a better parameterization of the infiltration process in land surface models and for testing infiltration models.

Description: SM2RAIN-CCI: a new global long-term rainfall data set derived from ESA CCI soil moisture Luca Ciabatta, Christian Massari, Luca Brocca, Alexander Gruber, Christoph Reimer, Sebastian Hahn, Christoph Paulik, Wouter Dorigo, Richard Kidd, and Wolfgang Wagner Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 10, 267-280, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-10-267-2018, 2018 In this study, rainfall is estimated starting from satellite soil moisture observation on a global scale, using the ESA CCI soil moisture datasets. The new obtained rainfall product has proven to correctly identify rainfall events, showing performance sometimes higher than those obtained by using classical rainfall estimation approaches.

Description: seNorge2 daily precipitation, an observational gridded dataset over Norway from 1957 to the present day Cristian Lussana, Tuomo Saloranta, Thomas Skaugen, Jan Magnusson, Ole Einar Tveito, and Jess Andersen Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 10, 235-249, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-10-235-2018, 2018 The observational gridded climate datasets are among the primary sources of information for climate analysis and monitoring. The seNorge2 high-resolution dataset of daily total precipitation (1957–2017) constitutes a valuable meteorological input for snow and hydrological simulations which are routinely conducted over Norway for research and to support operational applications for civil protection purposes. The dataset and the seNorge2 software are publicly available for download.

Description: Gross and net land cover changes in the main plant functional types derived from the annual ESA CCI land cover maps (1992–2015) Wei Li, Natasha MacBean, Philippe Ciais, Pierre Defourny, Céline Lamarche, Sophie Bontemps, Richard A. Houghton, and Shushi Peng Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 10, 219-234, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-10-219-2018, 2018 We evaluated the land cover changes based on plant functional types (PFTs) derived from the newly released annual ESA land cover maps. We addressed the geographical distributions and temporal trends of the translated PFT maps and compared with other datasets commonly used by the land surface model community. Different choices of these datasets for the applications in land surface models are proposed depending on the research purposes.

Description: The Alberta smoke plume observation study Kerry Anderson, Al Pankratz, Curtis Mooney, and Kelly Fleetham Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 10, 325-337, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-10-325-2018, 2018 A field project was conducted to measure smoke plumes from wildland fires in Alberta. This study used handheld inclinometers and photos taken at fire lookout towers. Observations of 222 plumes were collected from 2010 to 2015. Unanticipated issues were uncovered including instrument limitations, environmental conditions, and subjectivity of observations. Despite these problems, the data set showed responses to fire behaviour conditions consistent with processes leading to plume rise.