Empowering scalable, collaborative science
The Geoscience Data Exchange (GDEX) is NSF NCAR’s Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) and CoreTrustSeal certified data commons for Earth System Science.
It brings together datasets, model output, and analysis tools in one platform designed to help researchers, students, and collaborators easily find, access, and work with scientific data.
Built for discovery and innovation, GDEX sets a new standard for high-quality, analytics-ready data that supports everything from classroom learning to cutting-edge AI and climate research.
Why use GDEX?
GDEX helps you focus on science, not setup:
- Accelerate discovery: Explore analysis-ready datasets and models that are ready to use for research, coursework, and publications.
- Work at any scale: Connect directly to NSF NCAR’s world-class computing systems, Derecho, Casper, and CIRRUS, for faster, more powerful analysis.
- Save time: Access standardized, well-documented data so you can spend more time exploring results and less time wrangling files.
- Find what you need: Search across richly described, curated datasets built on metadata-driven architecture for clarity and precision.
- Collaborate easily: Share your findings, link to reproducible workflows, and build on others’ work within an open, trusted environment.
- Support open science: Every dataset and model in GDEX meets rigorous standards for quality, transparency, and long-term preservation.
- Enable AI/ML research: Use GDEX’s analytics-ready data to train, test, and validate machine learning models built for Earth System Science.
Need Access?
GDEX is accessible to US researchers through a range of allocations opportunities.
About Us
GDEX is maintained by the Data Engineering and Curation Services (DECS) team of the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory at the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research.
DECS Mission Statement
The DECS mission is to support atmospheric and related sciences research by maintaining and developing the Geoscience Data Exchange (GDEX), and reinforcing its utility with expert consulting. It is realized by:
- Managing a heterogeneous archive constructed over a 60+ year time period
- Supporting long-term preservation of irreplaceable data
- Acquiring data that extends and stewards essential ongoing datasets
- Expanding GDEX with new community reference datasets
- Implementing evolved IT functionality to enhance user data discovery and access
- Providing data management support to NCAR researchers
The DECS mission statement is motivated by the NCAR and NSF mission components.
GDEX is proud to be a CoreTrustSeal Certified Repository and a regular member of the World Data System. CoreTrustSeal is an international, community based, non-governmental, and non-profit organization promoting sustainable and trustworthhy data infrastructures. For transparency, CoreTrustSeal publishes a public version of each certified repository's application, including the GDEX application.