SPECS will undertake research and dissemination activities to deliver a new generation of European climate forecast systems, with improved forecast quality and efficient regionalisation tools to produce reliable, local climate information over land at seasonal-to-decadal time scales, and provide an enhanced communication protocol and services to satisfy the climate information needs of a wide range of public and private stakeholders. A core set of common experiments has been defined, to which most forecast systems will contribute. Another set of coordinated experiments, tier 1, includes the experiments that one or more forecast systems are planning to run. A standard seasonal experimental set up will consist of ten-member ensembles, with two start dates per year (first of May and November) over the 1981-2012 period and seven-month forecast length. The standard decadal experimental set up consists in five-member ensembles, starting on the first of November (or some time close to that date) of the years 1960, 1963, 1965, 1968, 1970, 1973, 1975, 1978, 1980, 1983, 1985, 1988, 1990, 1993, 1995, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2008, 2010, 2013, with a five-year forecast length. A description of the main experiments, with the minimum contribution in terms of start dates, forecast length and ensemble size follows: 1 - Assessment of the impact of soil-moisture initial conditions (seasonal): contributing EC-Earth, IFS/NEMO (ECMWF), CNRM-CM5 (MeteoF), UM, MPI-ESM (MPG); 2 - Assessment of the impact of sea-ice initialization (interannual); contributing EC-Earth (IC3), IPSL-CM5, CNRM-CM5 (MeteoF), UM, MPI-ESM (MPG) 3 - Assessment of impact of increased horizontal resolution (seasonal and decadal); contributing CNRM-CM5 (CERFACS, decadal; MeteoF, seasonal), EC-Earth (IC3, seasonal; KNMI and SMHI, decadal), MPI-ESM (MPG, seasonal and decadal), IPSL-CM5 (decadal), UM (seasonal and decadal); 4 - Assessment of impact of an improved stratosphere (seasonal and decadal) including interannually-varying ozone; contributing EC-Earth (KNMI seasonal with ozone; SMHI decadal), IFS/NEMO (ECMWF, seasonal), CNRM-CM5 (MeteoF, seasonal), UM (seasonal, decadal); 5 - Assessment of impact of additional start dates (decadal); contributing EC-Earth (KNMI, SMHI), MPI-ESM (MPG), IPSL-CM5. SPECS research has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under SPECS project (grant agreement n° 308378).

Data from the Instituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia INGV-SXG simulations

Tropospheric ORganic CHemistry Experiment (TORCH) was a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Polluted Troposphere Research Programme project (Round 1 - NER/T/S/2002/00145. Duration 2002 - 2005) led by A. Lewis, University of York. TORCH 1 took place in July and August 2003 at Writtle College, near Chelmsford, Essex. This dataset contains ECMWF trajectories

The COAPEC (Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Processes and European Climate) programme was a 5 year NERC thematic programme designed to examine the variability of the Earth's climate. Interactions between the oceans and the atmosphere play a major role in governing this variability. The goal of COAPEC was to determine the impact on climate, especially European climate, of the coupling between the Atlantic Ocean and the atmosphere, including the influence of ENSO on this coupling. To aid researchers within the COAPEC programme, datasets have been retrieved from a variety of coupled models. * 100 years (2079 - 2178) monthly means of all atmospheric and oceanic fields derived from the control run of the Hadley Centre HadCM3 model. * 1000 years (1849-2849) of monthly means of selected parameters from the HadCM3 control run. * 50 years (1950-2000) of MOM (GFDL Modular Ocean Model) data. * Output from the 100 year HadCM3 control integration produced using UM4.5 on the BADC Beowulf Cluster. * Surface flux climatology data from SOC If using the 100 year dataset from the Hadley Centre, please be aware that the run was restarted part of the way through. This means that there is a difference in the indicated date of origin in the data files, and can cause a discontinuity if not corrected for during analysis. The 1000 year HadCM3 dataset has been extracted from the Met Office and these data have been added to the archive. The data from a 500 year HadCM3 control integration performed on a linux Beowulf cluster using UM version 4.5 at the BADC has been included in the archive. Please see the README.txt for more information.

UK Met Office charts analyses pertaining to Mean Surface Level Pressure and 24 hour Weather Frontal Forecasting for the UK and Western Europe (see chart samples below). The charts have been produced by two systems at the Met Office and so are provided in two distinct datasets within this collection. The first set was delivered by the Met Office's GPCS Commercial Suite and covers the period 7th June 1999 to 24th June 2014. At this point the Met Office turned off that service and switched to providing images produced by the Met Office's SWIFT system using VisualWeather. These later data cover the period 30th June 2015 to present, though initially with some data gaps.

The UK's Natural Environment Research Council's (NERC) National Centre for Atmospheric Sciences (NCAS) operates a suite of instrumentation to monitor the atmospheric dynamics and composition of the atmosphere. This dataset brings together all the long term routine observations made by NCAS instruments covering surface based instruments as well as remote sensing instruments such as radars and lidars. Some of the instruments may also be deployed elsewhere on field campaigns, for which the data will be available under the associated field campaign dataset. Links are also available to pages describing the instruments from which links to all data from that particular instrument can be found.

The COSPAR International Reference Atmosphere (CIRA) provides empirical models of atmospheric temperatures and densities as recommended by the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR). A global climatology of atmospheric temperature, zonal velocity and geopotential height derived from a combination of satellite, radiosonde and ground-based measurements. The reference atmosphere extends from pole to pole and 0-120 km. The majority of the data are on a 5 degree latitude grid and approximately 2 km vertical resolution. This dataset is public. Since the early sixties, several different editions of CIRA have been published. The CIRA Working Group meets biannually during the COSPAR general assemblies. In the thermosphere (above about 100 km) CIRA-86 is identical with the MSIS model, which is available from NSSDC (MI-91E). The lower part (0-120 km) of CIRA-86 consists of tables of the monthly mean values of temperature and zonal wind with almost global coverage (80°N - 80°S). Two files were compiled by Fleming et al. (1988), one in pressure coordinates including also the geopotential heights, and one in height coordinates including also the pressure values. These tables were generated from several global data compilations including ground-based and satellite (Nimbus 5,6,7) measurements (see Oort (1983) and Labitzke et al. (1985)). The lower part was merged with MSIS-86 at 120 km altitude. In general, hydrostatic and thermal wind balance are maintained at all levels. The model accurately reproduces most of the characteristic features of the atmosphere such as the equatorial wind and the general structure of the tropopause, stratopause, and mesopause.

Standard resolution radiosonde data from worldwide upper air stations over the period 1997 - present (Some European stations are available from 1990). The dataset consists of vertical profiles of temperature, dew-point temperature, wind speed and wind direction from the surface to approximately 20-30 km. Data are reported up to four times daily. The data are provided by the Met Office.

CCMVal was a large international effort to improve understanding of Chemistry-Climate Models (CCMs) and their underlying GCMs (General Circulation Models) through process-oriented evaluation, along with discussion and coordinated analysis of science results. The first round of CCMVal (CCMVal-1) evaluated only a limited set of key processes in the CCMs, focusing mainly on dynamics and transport. This dataset collection contains atmospheric chemical model feedback from research centres around the world. CCMVal was part of the World Climate Research Programme's (WCRP), which mission is to facilitate analysis and prediction of Earth system variability and change for use in an increasing range of practical applications of direct relevance, benefit and value to society. This project was coordinated by SPARC (Stratosphere-troposphere Processes And their Role in Climate) as a core project of the World Climate Research Programme.

Data from the Armagh Observatory, founded in 1790 by Archbishop Richard Robinson. There are around 25 astronomers who are actively studying Stellar Astrophysics, the Sun, Solar System astronomy, and the Earth's climate. As well as astronomical observations various meteorological parameters have been recorded since 1794. The data held at the BADC are daily, mean monthly and seasonal and annual maximum and minimum temperatures from 1844, the 1m and 30 cm depth soil temperatures since 1904, precipitation since 1838 and sunshine daily and mean data produced by Armagh Observatory. If users wish to find data from other areas of work undertaken by the observatory they should visit the Armagh Observatory website.