Technical note: 3-hourly temporal downscaling of monthly global terrestrial biosphere model net ecosystem exchange

The land surface provides a boundary condition to atmospheric forward and flux inversion models. These models require prior estimates of CO2 fluxes at relatively high temporal resolutions (e.g., 3-hourly) because of the high frequency of atmospheric mixing and wind heterogeneity. However, land surface model CO2 fluxes are often provided at monthly time steps, typically because the land surface modeling community focuses more on time steps associated with plant phenology (e.g., seasonal) than on sub-daily phenomena. Here, we describe a new dataset created from 15 global land surface models and 4 ensemble products in the Multi-scale Synthesis and Terrestrial Model Intercomparison Project (MsTMIP), temporally downscaled from monthly to 3-hourly output. We provide 3-hourly output for each individual model over 7 years (2004-2010), as well as an ensemble mean, a weighted ensemble mean, and the multi-model standard deviation. Output is provided in three different spatial resolutions for user preferences: 0.5 degrees x 0.5 degrees, 2.0 degrees x 2.5 degrees, and 4.0 degrees x 5.0 degrees (latitude x longitude). These data are publicly available from doi:10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1315.