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Anthropogenic land use and land cover change (LULCC) is a major driver of environmental changes. The biophysical impacts of these changes on the regional climate in Europe are currently being extensively investigated within the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) Coordinated Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) Flagship Pilot Study (FPS) Land Use and Climate Across Scales (LUCAS) using an ensemble of different regional climate models (RCMs) coupled with diverse land surface models (LSMs). In order to investigate the impact of realistic LULCC on past and future climates, high-resolution datasets with observed LULCC and projected future LULCC scenarios are required as input for the RCM–LSM simulations. To account for these needs, we generated the LUCAS Land Use and land Cover change (LUC) dataset version 1.1 at 0.1 ∘ resolution for Europe with annual LULC maps from 1950 to 2100 (10.26050/WDCC/LUC_hist_EU_v1.1, , 10.26050/WDCC/LUC_future_EU_v1.1,), which is tailored to use in state-of-the-art RCMs. The plant functional type (PFT) distribution for the year 2015 (i.e. the Modelling human LAND surface Modifications and its feedbacks on local and regional cliMATE – LANDMATE – PFT dataset) is derived from the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative Land Cover (ESA-CCI LC) dataset. Details on the conversion method, cross-walking procedure, and evaluation of the LANDMATE PFT dataset are given in the companion paper by. Subsequently, we applied the land use change information from the Land-Use Harmonization 2 (LUH2) dataset, provided at 0.25 ∘ resolution as input for Coupled Modelling Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) experiments, to derive LULC distributions at high spatial resolution and at annual time steps from 1950 to 2100. In order to convert land use and land management change information from LUH2 into changes in the PFT distribution, we developed a land use translator (LUT) specific to the needs of RCMs. The annual PFT maps for Europe for the period 1950 to 2015 are derived from the historical LUH2 dataset by applying the LUT backward from 2015 to 1950. Historical changes in the forest type changes are considered using an additional European forest species dataset. The historical changes in the PFT distribution of LUCAS LUC follow closely the land use changes given by LUH2 but differ in some regions compared to other annual LULCC datasets. From 2016 onward, annual PFT maps for future land use change scenarios based on LUH2 are derived for different shared socioeconomic pathway (SSP) and representative concentration pathway (RCP) combinations used in the framework of CMIP6. The resulting LULCC maps can be applied as land use forcing to the new generation of RCM simulations for downscaling of CMIP6 results. The newly developed LUT is transferable to other CORDEX regions worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change increases the occurrence and severity of droughts due to increasing temperatures, altered circulation patterns, and reduced snow occurrence. While Europe has suffered from drought events in the last decade unlike ever seen since the beginning of weather recordings, harmonized long-term datasets across the continent are needed to monitor change and support predictions. Here we present soil moisture data from 66 cosmic-ray neutron sensors (CRNSs) in Europe (COSMOS-Europe for short) covering recent drought events. The CRNS sites are distributed across Europe and cover all major land use types and climate zones in Europe. The raw neutron count data from the CRNS stations were provided by 24 research institutions and processed using state-of-the-art methods. The harmonized processing included correction of the raw neutron counts and a harmonized methodology for the conversion into soil moisture based on available in situ information. In addition, the uncertainty estimate is provided with the dataset, information that is particularly useful for remote sensing and modeling applications. This paper presents the current spatiotemporal coverage of CRNS stations in Europe and describes the protocols for data processing from raw measurements to consistent soil moisture products. The data of the presented COSMOS-Europe network open up a manifold of potential applications for environmental research, such as remote sensing data validation, trend analysis, or model assimilation. The dataset could be of particular importance for the analysis of extreme climatic events at the continental scale. Due its timely relevance in the scope of climate change in the recent years, we demonstrate this potential application with a brief analysis on the spatiotemporal soil moisture variability. The dataset, entitled "Dataset of COSMOS-Europe: A European network of Cosmic-Ray Neutron Soil Moisture Sensors", is shared via Forschungszentrum Jülich: 10.34731/x9s3-kr48 (Bogena and Ney, 2021). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]