Global Observatory of Lake Responses to Environmental Change (GloboLakes) was a project funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) with the following grant references: NE/J023345/2, NE/J02211X/1, NE/J023396/1, NE/J021717/1 and NE/J022810/1.

This dataset contains the GloboLakes LSWT v4.0 of daily observations of Lake Surface Water Temperature (LSWT), its uncertainty and quality levels. The LSWTs are obtained by combining the orbit data from the AVHRR (Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer) on MetOpA, AATSR (Advanced Along Track Scanning Radiometer) on Envisat and ATSR-2 (Along Track Scanning Radiometer) on ERS-2 (European Remote Sensing Satellite). The temperatures from the different instruments have been derived with the same algorithm and harmonised to insure consistency for the period 1995-2016. The GloboLakes LSWT v4.0 was produced by the University of Reading in 2018 for long term observations of surface water temperature for about 1000 lakes globally.

The dataset consist of two sets of files: 1) a single file per day on a 0.05° regular latitude- longitude grid covering the period from June 1995 to December 2016 (folder = daily), 2) a file per lake which contains the time series (daily) of the lake on a 0.05° regular grid (folder = per-lake). The list of the GloboLakes lakes is included as a CSV file and it contains name, GLWD identifier, coordinate of the lake centre and a set of coordinates that can be used to locate the lake in the daily-file dataset. The LSWTs consists of the daily observations of the temperature of the water (skin temperature). Uncertainty estimates and quality levels are provided for each value.