ERA5 Essential Climate Variables monthly anomalies

The Essential Climate Variables for assessment of climate variability from 1979 to present dataset contains a selection of monthly anomalies of Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) suitable for monitoring and assessment of climate variability and change.

Here we propose a subset of the ECV world data for anomalies on soil water, two metre temperature and total precipitation, plus the sea-ice area fraction. The data are available from 1978 until the last closed month and updated monthly.

They are presented as a Zarr archive optimised for time analysis.

How to download the data

The default (and preferred) way to access the data requires accessing the api.earthdatahub.destine.eu domain and a valid API key.

Method 1: quick access

It is possible to include the token directly in the URL.

1import xarray as xr
2
3xr.open_dataset(
4    "https://edh:<your personal access token>@api.earthdatahub.destine.eu/more-era5/ecv-for-climate-change-1981-2010-anomaly-v0",
5    chunks={},
6    engine="zarr",
7)

Method 2: advanced access

The Python snippet gather the token from a netrc file.

It's required to before running the code snippet below.

1import xarray as xr
2
3xr.open_dataset(
4    "https://api.earthdatahub.destine.eu/more-era5/ecv-for-climate-change-1981-2010-anomaly-v0",
5    storage_options={"client_kwargs":{"trust_env":True}},
6    chunks={},
7    engine="zarr",
8)

Variables

Short Name	Units	Description
r	%	Relative humidity
siconc	(0 - 1)	Sea ice area fraction
t2m	K	2 metre temperature
tp	m	Total precipitation