Current status of the Global Energy Balance Archive (GEBA)

The Global Energy Balance Archive (GEBA) is an international data center for worldwide measurements of energy fluxes at the Earth’s surface, maintained at ETH Zurich (https://geba.ethz.ch). The mission of GEBA is to compile all accessible sources of directly measured surface energy fluxes into a central data archive. GEBA has been continuously expanded and updated and currently contains around 700,000 monthly mean records of various surface energy balance components measured at approximately 2,700 locations worldwide. By far the most widely represented quantity is surface shortwave irradiance, also known as global radiation. Many of the historical records of this quantity stored in GEBA extend over multiple decades, with the longest record (Stockholm) dating back to 1927.

For nearly 35 years, since its opening to the internet in the early 1990s, GEBA has served the international scientific community and is well established as a major data source for measured surface energy fluxes. GEBA data have been used in numerous publications in leading peer-reviewed journals, including Nature and Science. GEBA has played a key role in a wide range of research applications, for example in quantifying the global energy balance as presented in the 5th and 6th IPCC Assessment Reports, and in the detection of pronounced multi-decadal variations in surface solar radiation, known as “global dimming” and “brightening”. GEBA is also widely used as a reference for the evaluation of climate models, reanalyses, and satellite-derived products. On a more applied level, GEBA data are becoming increasingly important for the planning and management of solar power capacities in support of the net-zero emissions target for 2050.

Beyond regular data updates and the acquisition of new datasets, current developments focus on the introduction of a versioning system to enable a traceable documentation of the GEBA data status, as well as on the application of quality-control procedures developed at DWD/CMSAF. In particular, homogeneity tests are foreseen to detect outliers, inhomogeneities and breakpoints in the GEBA station time series data based on comparisons with multiple independent satellite-derived and reanalysis estimates (e.g., SARAH-3, CLARA-A3, and ERA5).

Since 2019, GEBA has been co-funded by the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss within the framework of GCOS Switzerland.