QUEST projects both used and produced an immense variety of global data sets that needed to be shared efficiently between the project teams. These global synthesis data sets are also a key part of QUEST's legacy, providing a powerful way of communicating the results of QUEST among and beyond the UK Earth System research community. This dataset contains socio-economic scenarios from the IPCC SRES report.

QUEST projects both used and produced an immense variety of global data sets that needed to be shared efficiently between the project teams. These global synthesis data sets are also a key part of QUEST's legacy, providing a powerful way of communicating the results of QUEST among and beyond the UK Earth System research community. This dataset contains decadal surface meteorology climatologies from CRU TS3.0 data 1901- 2000. Data includes parameters such as temperature, water vapour and precipitation.

The QUEST-GSI WPd1 "Climate scenarios". The aim was to construct climate scenarios representing the effects of uncertainty and different rates of climate forcing. This dataset contains model data which construct climate scenarios. The project requires climate scenarios which (a) characterise the uncertainty in the climate change associated with a given forcing, including changes in climate variability and extreme events, and (b) allow the construction of generalised relationships between climate forcing and impact.

QUEST projects both used and produced an immense variety of global data sets that needed to be shared efficiently between the project teams. These global synthesis data sets are also a key part of QUEST's legacy, providing a powerful way of communicating the results of QUEST among and beyond the UK Earth System research community. This dataset contains global Population Distribution (1990), Terrestrial Area and Country Name Information on a One by One Degree Grid Cell Basis.

QUEST projects both used and produced an immense variety of global data sets that needed to be shared efficiently between the project teams. These global synthesis data sets are also a key part of QUEST's legacy, providing a powerful way of communicating the results of QUEST among and beyond the UK Earth System research community. This dataset contains 30 year surface meteorology climatologies from CRU TS3.0 data. Data includes parameters such as temperature, water vapour and precipitation.

QUEST projects both used and produced an immense variety of global data sets that needed to be shared efficiently between the project teams. These global synthesis data sets are also a key part of QUEST's legacy, providing a powerful way of communicating the results of QUEST among and beyond the UK Earth System research community. This dataset contains monthly climatology measurements for 1961-1990.

QUERCC addresses land surface processes over timescales from days to centuries, with particular emphasis on the carbon cycle. Some processes are already well represented and validated in Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVMs), while others that are known to impact on the carbon cycle are not. Independent carbon and vegetation data sets are being compared against DVGMs to assess their current state, and further key modules will be developed for nutrient cycling, which exerts a major feedback on carbon exchange, and for a greater resolution of plant processes. This dataset contains a global map of plant functional types that exert significant impacts on the carbon cycle as modelled by the Rothamsted Research institute based on the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) soil properties.

This dataset represent hydrological statistics calculated over a 30‐year period, at a spatial resolution (over land) of 0.5x0.5o across the global domain. The simulations were made using the global hydrological model Mac‐PDM.09. The data files represent runoff simulated with the baseline (1961‐1990) climate, together with runoff simulated by climate change scenarios derived from CMIP3 global climate model output (i) based on specific IPCC SRES emissions scenarios (“SRES”) and (ii) scaled to represent prescribed changes in global mean temperature (“PRESC”), and from CMIP5 global climate model output based on RCP scenarios. The simulations were run at the University of Reading between 2009 and 2013. See Gosling & Arnell (2011)mfor a description and validation of Mac‐PDM.09, and Arnell & Gosling (2013) for details of the CMIP3 climate change scenarios and their application to the simulation of river runoff. Arnell & Lloyd‐Hughes (2013) describe the application of the model with CMIP5 scenarios.

QUEST GSI was led by Nigel Arnell (University of Reading) with co-investigators from the Universities of Aberdeen, Leeds, UEA, Edinburgh, Southampton, UCL, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, CEH and CEFAS. This dataset collection contains model data simulations under various climate, run-off and aquatic scenarios. A central aim of this project was to assess the global-scale impacts of climate change under a range of scenarios, across a number of sectors. A methodology was developed to construct scenarios from a range of climate models, representing changes under different emissions scenarios and fixed amounts of change in global mean temperature. Impacts were estimated across a range of sectors, including water resources, fluvial and coastal flooding, crop productivity and food security, ecosystem productivity and human health, at regional and global scales. The project has provided quantitative information on these impacts and their distribution across the world. The general conclusions are that impacts may be significant at relatively low levels of climate change, that estimates of impact in some sectors are very uncertain due largely to uncertainty in projected changes in rainfall (particularly in south Asia), that there are no obvious thresholds for step changes in impact that are consistent across region and sector, and that socio-economic conditions may amplify or reduce impacts, depending on context. A second project aim was to develop the methodology in such a way that it could be readily applied to estimate impacts under other climate scenarios representing for example specific policy objectives. With additional funding from other sources, the project methodology has been applied successfully to estimate the impacts avoided by a set of feasible emissions policies.

FireMAFS was led by Prof Martin Wooster (Kings College, London) as part of QUEST Theme 3 (Quantifying and Understanding the Earth System) project. This dataset collection contains the MODIS Land Cover Type product multiple classification schemes, which describe land cover properties derived from observations spanning a year’s input of Terra and Aqua data. The data are stored in a 10 arc minute grid. Fire was the most important disturbance agent worldwide in terms of area and variety of biomass affected, a major mechanism by which carbon is transferred from the land to the atmosphere, and a globally significant source of aerosols and many trace gas species. Despite such clear coupling between fire, climate, and vegetation, fire was not modelled as an interactive component of the climate/earth systems models of full complexity or intermediate complexity, that are used to model terrestrial ecosystem processes principally for simulating CO2 exchanges. The objective of FireMAFS was to resolve these limitations by developing a robust method to forecast fire activity (fire 'danger' indices, ignition probabilities, burnt area, fire intensity etc), via a process-based model of fire-vegetation interactions, tested, improved, and constrained. This used a state-of-the-art EO data products and driven by seasonal weather forecasts issued with many months lead-time. Much of the activity of FireMAFS was shaped by the research and technical priorities of QUESTESM (earth system model). Key activities included the progressive development of the JULES-ED and SPITFIRE submodels. Fire is now very well represented in QESM (Quest Earth System Model), making progress towards a modelling capability for fire risk forecasting in the context of global change.