Data is a central piece of the climate change debate. With the climate change datasets on this list, many data scientists have created visualizations and models to measure and track the change in surface temperatures, sea ice levels, and more. Many of these datasets have been made public to allow people to contribute and add valuable insight into the way the climate is changing and its causes.

We hope this collection provides you with a jumping off point to use your skills to contribute to one of the biggest and most important challenges of our time.

Global Climate Change Datasets

1.Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Data – From the Berkeley Earth Data page, this dataset in made up or temperature recordings from the Earth’s surface.

The data ranges from November 1st, 1743 to December 1st, 2015. The dataset is divided into several files including:

• GlobalTemperatures

• GlobalLandTemperaturesByCountry

• GlobalLandTemperaturesByState

• GlobalLandTemperaturesByMajorCity

• GlobalLandTemperaturesByCity

2.Global Climate Change Data – This dataset includes information from the Climate Change Knowledge Portal and World Development indicators. It covers various topics such as greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption, and more. The total time period of the data covers 1990 – 2011.

3.International Greenhouse Gas Emissions – Created by the United Nations, this Kaggle dataset contains Greenhouse Gas Inventory Data from 1990 to 2014. The official UN website has updated the dataset up to 2017. It includes emission levels by country and region for the following gases:

• carbon dioxide (CO2)

• methane (CH4)

• nitrous oxide (N2O)

• hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs)

• perfluorocarbons (PFCs)

• unspecified mix of HFCs and PFCs

• sulphur hexafluoride (SF6)

• nitrogen trifluoride (NF3)

4.Daily Sea Ice Extent Data – From The National Snow and Ice Data Center, this climate change dataset has information on the Earth’s cryosphere, and includes glacier, ice, snow and frozen ground data. The dataset has seven columns: year, month, day, extent, missing, source, and hemisphere. Extent refers to the area of the ocean that includes portions of sea ice.

5.Climate Change Adaptation of Coffee Production – From the Harvard Dataverse, this dataset was created to determine the impact of climate change on coffee production quality in Nicaragua. The dataset is divided into six Geotiff Raster files.