ESSD cover
Chief editors: Kirsten Elger, Sibylle K. Hassler, Conrad Jackisch, Graciela Raga, François G. Schmitt, Hanqin Tian, Baptiste Vandecrux & Yuyu Zhou
eISSN: ESSD 1866-3516, ESSDD 1866-3591

Earth System Science Data (ESSD) is an international, interdisciplinary journal for the publication of articles on original research data (sets), furthering the reuse of high-quality data of benefit to Earth system sciences. The editors encourage submissions on original data or data collections which are of sufficient quality and have potential to contribute to these aims. The journal maintains sections for regular-length articles, brief communications (e.g. on additions to data sets) and commentaries, as well as review articles and special issues.

This short commentary draws on ESSD author, reviewer and editor experiences over its first 10 years of operation to define guidelines, requirements and benefits of the ESSD processes.

News

11 Jun 2026 Indicators of Global Climate Change 2025: annual update of key indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence

ESSD announces the publication of an update to IPCC's most recent assessment. Please read more.

11 Jun 2026 Indicators of Global Climate Change 2025: annual update of key indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence

ESSD announces the publication of an update to IPCC's most recent assessment. Please read more.

07 May 2026 Temporary unavailability of article and preprint PDFs due to technical issues

Since Tuesday, 5 May, 06:30 CET, we have been experiencing technical issues caused by high demand on our systems, which have significantly affected our journal libraries. To maintain platform stability and ensure continued access to critical services, all preprint and journal article PDFs were temporarily restricted, while HTML full-text content and XML files remained available. Since Thursday, 7 May, 08:30 CET, we have made the preprint PDFs available again; however, journal article PDFs remain restricted until the technical issues have been resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience as we work to restore full PDF access as quickly as possible. Thank you for your understanding.

07 May 2026 Temporary unavailability of article and preprint PDFs due to technical issues

Since Tuesday, 5 May, 06:30 CET, we have been experiencing technical issues caused by high demand on our systems, which have significantly affected our journal libraries. To maintain platform stability and ensure continued access to critical services, all preprint and journal article PDFs were temporarily restricted, while HTML full-text content and XML files remained available. Since Thursday, 7 May, 08:30 CET, we have made the preprint PDFs available again; however, journal article PDFs remain restricted until the technical issues have been resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience as we work to restore full PDF access as quickly as possible. Thank you for your understanding.

02 Apr 2026 Australia's terrestrial industrial footprint and ecological intactness

The authors developed two datasets representing human industrial pressures and ecological intactness across Australia's landscapes. These datasets fill a long-standing gap in national-scale pressure mapping, providing key insights into human disturbance of the environment. Please read more.

02 Apr 2026 Australia's terrestrial industrial footprint and ecological intactness

The authors developed two datasets representing human industrial pressures and ecological intactness across Australia's landscapes. These datasets fill a long-standing gap in national-scale pressure mapping, providing key insights into human disturbance of the environment. Please read more.

Highlight articles

11 Jun 2026
Indicators of Global Climate Change 2025: annual update of key indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence
Piers M. Forster, Tristram Walsh, Chris Smith, William F. Lamb, Robin Lamboll, Christophe Cassou, Mathias Hauser, Zeke Hausfather, June-Yi Lee, Matthew D. Palmer, Karina von Schuckmann, Aimée B. A. Slangen, Sophie Szopa, Blair Trewin, Jeongeun Yun, Nathan P. Gillett, Stuart Jenkins, H. Damon Matthews, Krishnan Raghavan, Aurélien Ribes, Joeri Rogelj, Debbie Rosen, Xuebin Zhang, Myles Allen, Robbie M. Andrew, Chris Atkinson, Richard A. Betts, Antonio Bombelli, Samantha N. Burgess, Lijing Cheng, Helen E. Claxton, Pierre Friedlingstein, Thomas L. Frölicher, Catia M. Domingues, Thomas Gasser, Catherine H. Gregory, Rachel M. Hoesly, Daniel Huppmann, Masayoshi Ishii, Christopher Kadow, Alexia Karwat, John Kennedy, Rachel E. Killick, Mahesh V. M. Kovilakam, Paul B. Krummel, Xin Lan, Jean-François Lamarque, Aurélien Liné, Belén Martín-Míguez, Didier P. Monselesan, Colin Morice, Jens Mühle, Pino Mussak, Glen P. Peters, Anna Pirani, Julia Pongratz, Matthew Rigby, Robert Rohde, Abhishek Savita, Sonia I. Seneviratne, Steven J. Smith, Ghassan Taha, Caterina Tassone, Peter Thorne, Christopher Wells, Luke M. Western, Guido R. van der Werf, Susan E. Wijffels, Marco Zecchetto, Junting Zhong, Xiao-Ye Zhang, Valérie Masson-Delmotte, and Panmao Zhai
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 18, 3889–3933, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-18-3889-2026,https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-18-3889-2026, 2026
Short summary Editorial statement
22 May 2026
Machine-learning-based estimates of global natural vegetated wetland methane emissions (2000–2025)
Mengze Li, Robert B. Jackson, Marielle Saunois, Philippe Ciais, Ben Poulter, Josep G. Canadell, Prabir K. Patra, Hanqin Tian, Zhen Zhang, Etienne Fluet-Chouinard, Zutao Ouyang, Ting Zhang, David J. Beerling, Dmitry A. Belikov, Philippe Bousquet, Danilo Custodio, Naveen Chandra, Xinyu Dou, Nicola Gedney, Peter O. Hopcroft, Alison M. Hoyt, Kazuhito Ichii, Akihito Ito, Atul K. Jain, Katherine Jensen, Fortunat Joos, Thomas Kleinen, Masayuki Kondo, Fa Li, Tingting Li, Xiangyu Liu, Shamil Maksyutov, Avni Malhotra, Adrien Martinez, Kyle McDonald, Joe R. Melton, Jurek Müller, Yosuke Niwa, Shufen Pan, Shushi Peng, Changhui Peng, Zhangcai Qin, Peter Raymond, William Riley, Arjo Segers, Rona L. Thompson, Aki Tsuruta, Yi Xi, Kunxiaojia Yuan, Wenxin Zhang, Bo Zheng, Qing Zhu, Qiuan Zhu, and Qianlai Zhuang
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 18, 3507–3524, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-18-3507-2026,https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-18-3507-2026, 2026
Short summary Editorial statement
29 Apr 2026
Creation and analysis of a multi-hazard dataset: Tenerife (Canary Islands) as a case study
Marta López-Saavedra, Joan Martí, and Marc Martínez-Sepúlveda
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 18, 2979–2998, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-18-2979-2026,https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-18-2979-2026, 2026
Short summary Editorial statement

Recent papers

11 Jun 2026
| Highlight paper
Indicators of Global Climate Change 2025: annual update of key indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence
Piers M. Forster, Tristram Walsh, Chris Smith, William F. Lamb, Robin Lamboll, Christophe Cassou, Mathias Hauser, Zeke Hausfather, June-Yi Lee, Matthew D. Palmer, Karina von Schuckmann, Aimée B. A. Slangen, Sophie Szopa, Blair Trewin, Jeongeun Yun, Nathan P. Gillett, Stuart Jenkins, H. Damon Matthews, Krishnan Raghavan, Aurélien Ribes, Joeri Rogelj, Debbie Rosen, Xuebin Zhang, Myles Allen, Robbie M. Andrew, Chris Atkinson, Richard A. Betts, Antonio Bombelli, Samantha N. Burgess, Lijing Cheng, Helen E. Claxton, Pierre Friedlingstein, Thomas L. Frölicher, Catia M. Domingues, Thomas Gasser, Catherine H. Gregory, Rachel M. Hoesly, Daniel Huppmann, Masayoshi Ishii, Christopher Kadow, Alexia Karwat, John Kennedy, Rachel E. Killick, Mahesh V. M. Kovilakam, Paul B. Krummel, Xin Lan, Jean-François Lamarque, Aurélien Liné, Belén Martín-Míguez, Didier P. Monselesan, Colin Morice, Jens Mühle, Pino Mussak, Glen P. Peters, Anna Pirani, Julia Pongratz, Matthew Rigby, Robert Rohde, Abhishek Savita, Sonia I. Seneviratne, Steven J. Smith, Ghassan Taha, Caterina Tassone, Peter Thorne, Christopher Wells, Luke M. Western, Guido R. van der Werf, Susan E. Wijffels, Marco Zecchetto, Junting Zhong, Xiao-Ye Zhang, Valérie Masson-Delmotte, and Panmao Zhai
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 18, 3889–3933, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-18-3889-2026,https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-18-3889-2026, 2026
Short summary Editorial statement
11 Jun 2026
Caravan-CMIP6: Bias-corrected climate model projections for ten large-sample hydrometeorological datasets and over 23,000 global catchments
Sacha Walde Ruzzante
Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss., https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2026-350,https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2026-350, 2026
Preprint under review for ESSD (discussion: open, 0 comments)
Short summary
11 Jun 2026
Improving global and regional ocean heat content by consistently combining GRACE gravity, satellite altimetry and Argo profile observations in a joint inversion framework
Bernd Uebbing, Kristin Vielberg, Roelof Rietbroek, Bene Aschenneller, Armin Köhl, and Jürgen Kusche
Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss., https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2026-368,https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2026-368, 2026
Preprint under review for ESSD (discussion: open, 0 comments)
Short summary
11 Jun 2026
FDU-BTR: a physics-guided ensemble learning reconstruction of global surface-ocean pCO2 (1982–2024) with uncertainty diagnostics
Zhenguo Wang and Weiwei Fu
Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss., https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2026-375,https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2026-375, 2026
Preprint under review for ESSD (discussion: open, 0 comments)
Short summary
11 Jun 2026
Regional high-resolution eddy model and data fusion dataset EFGO
Chunling Zhang, Aoran Sun, Kefeng Mao, Zenghong Liu, Penghao Wang, Lifu Fu, Yuhang Zhu, and Jiahui Fan
Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss., https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2026-398,https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2026-398, 2026
Preprint under review for ESSD (discussion: upcoming, 0 comments)
Short summary

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In accordance with current European restrictions, Copernicus Publications does not step into business relations with and issue APC invoices (articles processing charges) to Russian and Belarusian institutions. The peer-review process and scientific exchange of our journals including preprint posting is not affected. However, these restrictions require that the first contact (contractual partner of Copernicus) has an affiliation and invoice address outside Russia or Belarus.