Making climate reanalysis and CMIP6 data processing easy: two “point-and-click” cloud based user interfaces for environmental and ecological studies

Abstract

Climate reanalysis and climate projection datasets offer the potential for researchers, students and instructors to access physically informed, global scale, temporally and spatially continuous climate data from the latter half of the 20th century to present, and explore different potential future climates. While these data are of significant use to research and teaching within biological, environmental and social sciences, potential users often face barriers to processing and accessing the data that cannot be overcome without specialist knowledge, facilities or assistance. Consequently, climate reanalysis and projection data are currently substantially under-utilised within research and education communities. To address this issue, we present two simple “point-and-click” graphical user interfaces: the Google Earth Engine Climate Tool (GEEClimT), providing access to climate reanalysis data products; and Google Earth Engine CMIP6 Explorer (GEECE), allowing processing and extraction of CMIP6 projection data, including the ability to create custom model ensembles. Together GEEClimT and GEECE provide easy access to over 387 terabytes of data that can be output in commonly used spreadsheet (CSV) or raster (GeoTIFF) formats to aid subsequent offline analysis. Data included in the two tools include: 20 atmospheric, terrestrial and oceanic reanalysis data products; a new dataset of annual resolution climate variables (comparable to WorldClim) calculated from ERA5-Land data for 1950-2022; and CMIP6 climate projection output for 34 model simulations for historical, SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5 scenarios. New data products can also be easily added to the tools as they become available within the Google Earth Engine Data Catalog. Five case studies that use data from both tools are also provided. These show that GEEClimT and GEECE are easily expandable tools that remove multiple barriers to entry that will open use of climate reanalysis and projection data to a new and wider range of users.