A 20-Year Legacy of Open Climate Data Access
From its origins in the early 2000s through its retirement in 2025, the “Gateway” was a foundational data infrastructure operated by NSF NCAR, supporting global Earth system science (ESS) for over two decades.
Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy, Earth System Grid Center for Enabling Technologies (ESG-CET), Gateway enabled open, large-scale access to some of the world’s most influential climate datasets.
Gateway Origins (2000-2015 Feature Development)
What the Gateway Hosted
- Major Community Data Products
- CMIP3, CMIP5, CMIP6
- North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP)
- North American Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment Program (NA-CORDEX)
- Large Ensemble Community Project (CESM LENS, CESM2 LENS)
- NCAR Command Language (NCL) Software
Gateway by the Numbers
15 years (2010–2025) of operation
140,000+ Datasets Hosted
27 million Files Hosted
~17 million Files at Decommissioning
Feb 17, 2010 First Download
194+ million Total Downloads
~57 petabytes of Data Delivered
14,381 GitHub Commits