ICOS Data Portal provides observational data and elaborated products on greenhouse gases. Data sets can be visualised and downloaded fully and/or partially. Read below how to search, find and download data.
How to search ICOS data
You can search for data using the Data Portal or SPARQL Endpoint (more advanced option). You can access and search for datasets on the Data Portal page using the filters given in the menu on the left site. The SPARQL endpoint can also be used to search for metadata.
In the main menu of Data Portal use ‘DATA’ to open the data discovery page. On this page you can select the first filters that limit the list of data in the Data Portal. After this basic selection, you can press the ‘Find data’ button and you will land at the Data Portal main discovery app where the first selection is made. You can then further limit the selection by using filter variables in the list on the left. The number of variables is now still limited but will be extended when more diverse data comes in. The description of the variables options is given below.
‘Advanced search’ brings you directly to the Data Portal page.
NOTE: Not all datasets presented in the Data Portal are directly available. Raw data that was not quality assessed and checked is only available on request both for preview and download, but all information about the data is presented on the landing page. You can contact the responsible Thematic Centre (as indicated at the landing page of the dataset) to get access to this data.
How to visualise data
A picture says more than 1000 words – we understand that you want to look at the data of interest! Each data set can be previewed graphically, depending on the type of data in a scatter/line diagram or as a map. We have and are developing several visualisation services that are integrated in the Data Portal for different types of data products.
About the landing page
A landing page presents available information on a data object or for example a station. In principle, all available metadata of the data object could be presented on its landing page. You can access the landing page by selecting the data set from the list in the Data Portal. Much of the available metadata is only presented as linked data and machine readable. To present all metadata of an object in human readable format could result in large and unclear pages.
We invite you to look through the metadata that is presented. If you think that additional information on the data set should be presented on the landing page, please give us feedback.
About the shopping cart system
The Data Portal service is using a shopping cart system – just like an online shop. You can put the data sets you like into the shopping cart. From there, you can visualise or download the data sets for free. When you are logged in on the user account, the cart is automatically saved so it is possible to change device before downloading.
Download ICOS data
You can download the data from the data cart. Note that you need to accept our Data Policy and Data Licensing Agreements first. When you want to download more often, it is recommended to create a user account and login next time using that account. Through this account, you need to accept the license only once and you can keep record of your previous data selections.
To download data objects programmatically, using our API, you will need to create an account (see the MyCP user account section below). Then, you can follow the instructions from the GitHub repository readme file, including an example of using the curl command to download a data object.
How to cite and acknowledge ICOS data
Sharing data is essential for making your research impactful and generalisable, as you often need data from multiple stations or over a long time period. Giving your data proper credit helps to secure funding for maintaining the stations that produce the data, which increases the quality and quantity of the available data. Moreover, within ICOS community, proper acknowledgements ensure that your papers are counted as using ICOS data. Learn how to properly cite and acknowledge ICOS data here.
Help for advanced users, sharing of our code at Github and raising issues
All code developed by ICOS Carbon Portal is shared in our Github repositories under a GPL license. For feature requests or bug reports, please The Github repository also contains code examples and documentation on how to use our services for data providers, and advanced data users that want to query our repository or download data using our python library pylib.
MyCP user account
If you are a frequent user of ICOS data and services, you can create a user account. This can be done by registering to the Data Portal at the ICOS Carbon Portal Authentication Service called MyCP.
Using the services while being logged in through your account makes it possible to download data without accepting the data license every time you download data. The account will also keep an overview of data that you have downloaded and store the last data card. The last service makes it possible to come back to the data search from another device if needed.
You can sign in with your institutional login through eduGAIN (preferred) or, if that does not work, through the social or password login. For the password login you should first create an account. You can create an account through the same page as the account login.