The Global Energy Balance Archive (GEBA) – Recent Developments, Current Database Access, Use for Research, Future Expansion

The Global Energy Balance Archive (GEBA) was founded by Professor Atsumu Ohmura after the (meta)data collection started in the early 1980s. Maintained at ETH Zurich, GEBA stores worldwide measured energy fluxes at the Earth’s surface over several decades (Wild et al. 2017). The knowledge of their spatio-temporal distribution is essential for understanding the genesis and evolution of the Earth’s climate and required for practical applications in the sectors of renewable energy, agriculture, water management and tourism. GEBA currently contains more than 700,000 monthly mean entries for various energy balance components, the most widely represented one being global (incoming shortwave) radiation. The observations at more than 2700 stations come from a variety of sources in heterogeneous formats. Data accessed through GEBA have been used in numerous scientific publications dealing with e.g. the quantification of the Earth’s energy balance, the estimation of long-term trends, which enabled the detection of multi-decadal variations known as “global dimming” and “brightening”, and the evaluation of surface fluxes in climate models and satellite-derived products. First organized in an Oracle relational database, GEBA serves the climate community since 1991 and (meta)data, associated with quality flags, are available on the internet since 1997. Recently, GEBA necessitated a technical revision of its infrastructure dating back to the 1990s, process automation and update of its contents. The ongoing major re-design and operational maintenance work is co-​funded since 2019 by the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology (MeteoSwiss) within the framework of the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) Switzerland, according to its climate monitoring principle #10 “Data management systems that facilitate access, use and interpretation of data and products should be included as essential elements of climate monitoring systems”.

This poster presents (i) the challenges of the recent migration of GEBA to an open-source PostgreSQL platform, (ii) the state-of-the-art re-implementation of the web access interface displaying up-to-date database content status and allowing, after registration, user-friendlier data search, (iii) the key role GEBA plays in various research applications, and (iv) opportunities for quality improvement and future expansion. The new flexible and history-aware relational model (schema) and processing layer for computing derived data strive to solve inconsistency and redundancy issues in (meta)data structure and meet standardization goals (ISO, WMO, WRR), developer and user needs. Feedback from experts and offers from potential data contributors will be welcome and integrated into the project’s evolution.

We gratefully acknowledge the (meta)data sources (including WRDC, BSRN, ARM, SURFRAD, national weather services, project reports, OSCAR/Surface) and many observers in the field. We are indebted to the IT Services of ETH Zürich and the ETH “DocJob” students.

 

Reference:

Wild, M., A. Ohmura, C. Schär, G. Müller, D. Folini, M. Schwarz, M. Z. Hakuba, A. Sanchez-Lorenzo (2017), The Global Energy Balance Archive (GEBA) version 2017: a database for worldwide measured surface energy fluxes, Earth System Science Data, 9, 601-613.