GEEClimT/GEECE

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. These data are of significant use to research and teaching within biological, environmental and social sciences, but potential users often face barriers to processing and accessing the data that cannot be overcome without specialist knowledge, facilities or assistance.

To address this issue, we have created 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 currently 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.

Users who make use of these tools should cite: Lea JM, Fitt RNL, Brough S, Carr G, Dick J, Jones N and Webster RJ (2024) Making climate reanalysis and CMIP6 data processing easy: two “point-and-click” cloud based user interfaces for environmental and ecological studies. Front. Environ. Sci. 12:1294446. doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2024.1294446.

Getting access to GEEClimT

The Google Earth Engine Climate Tool (GEEClimT) is an easy to use point and click interface to extract climate reanalysis data for academic research, education and outreach purposes. More details about the tool and case studies of its use can be found in the associated paper (Lea et al., 2024). To get access to the tool and see a walkthrough for how to use it, see the GitHub readme here.

Getting access to GEECE

The Google Earth Engine CMIP6 Explorer (GEECE) is an easy to use point and click interface to extract, process, create custom model ensembles and resample CMIP6 simulation data for historical (1950-2015), SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5 scenarios (2015-2100). More details about the tool and case studies of its use can be found in the associated paper (Lea et al., 2024). To get access to the tool and see a walkthrough for how to use it, see the GitHub readme here.