The Global Energy Balance Archive (GEBA): a database for worldwide measured surface energy fluxes

The Global Energy Balance Archive (GEBA) is an international data center for globally measured energy fluxes at the Earth’s surface, hosted at ETH Zurich (Wild et al., 2017, ESSD). Knowledge of the spatio-temporal distribution of surface energy fluxes is essential for understanding the origin and evolution of the Earth’s climate, and is also highly relevant for practical applications in sectors such as renewable energy, agriculture, water management, and tourism.

GEBA currently contains more than 700,000 monthly mean entries for various components of the surface energy balance. The most widely represented quantity is surface shortwave irradiance, also known as global radiation. Many of the historical records stored in GEBA extend over multiple decades, with the longest record (Stockholm) dating back to 1927.

GEBA data have been widely used in scientific studies addressing, for example, 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, reanalyses and satellite-derived products. Since becoming accessible online in 1997, GEBA has served the international climate research community for almost 30 years. Recently, GEBA underwent a major technical modernization, replacing its legacy infrastructure from the 1990s with a PostgreSQL database system. This redesign and its ongoing operational maintenance have been co-funded since 2019 by the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology (MeteoSwiss) within the framework of the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) Switzerland.

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