NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland maintains the Global Change Master Directory, one of the largest (if not *the* largest) collections of links to data I’ve found on the Internet, somewhere on the order of 15,000. While the header refers to “Earth science data and services”, it’s not limiting itself to the traditional definition of “Earth science” there (i.e. fields like geology, geophysics, meteorology, etc.).
The data is initially divided into 14 broad groupings:
- Agriculture
- Atmosphere
- Biosphere
- Biological Classification
- Climate Indicators
- Cryosphere
- Human Dimensions
- Land Surface
- Oceans
- Paleoclimate
- Solid Earth
- Spectral/Engineering
- Sun-Earth Interactions
- Terrestrial Hydrosphere
Going to these pages, you’ll find the topics broken down further into subtopics, and even sub-sub-topics. For example, under Climate Indicators, you’ll find sub-topics for:
- Air Temperature Indices
- Drought/Precipitation Indices
- Humidity Indices
- Hydrologic/Ocean Indices
- Ocean/SST Indices
- Teleconnections
You can also search for data by map, date or location name. This is a “must-bookmark” data resource.