Orbital: orbital elements and insolation
The orbital elements of the Earth and insolation series computed from them, the forcing of glacial cycles. Orbital is a records dataset (non-gridded data, see Records): its products, defined in Orbital/records.toml, are prepared files in the form of the CF discrete sampling geometries, written to $FESMDATA_PRODUCTS/Records/Orbital/Orbital-<product>.nc, each with its text form (.txt).
Products
| Product | Source | Variables | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
Orbital-La2004 |
Laskar et al. (2004): La2004 orbital solution, doi:10.1051/0004-6361:20041335 | ecc, obl (degree), per (degree), prec; insol_65n_jun21, insol_65n_jja, insol_65s_dec21, insol_65s_djf (W m-2) |
5 Ma ago to 1 Ma in the future, 1 kyr |
A series of the region “global” without a location (featureType timeSeries, dimension region, lat and lon missing). time is in years before 1950 CE (units “years ago”), negative in the future.
The insolation is the daily mean at the top of the atmosphere, computed in closed form (Berger, 1978) as in the insol library used by the models (fesmc/insol), with S0 = 1365 W m-2 and a year of 365 days with the vernal equinox on 21 March (21 June: day 172, 21 December: day 355); the seasonal means are means of the daily values (JJA: days 152-243, DJF: 335-365 and 1-59). Models that need other latitudes or days compute them from the elements, or with insol.
Licences
| Source | Licence |
|---|---|
| Laskar et al. (2004), La2004 | No licence stated (ASD/IMCCE); publishing assumed to be allowed |
Making the dataset
julia fesmdata.jl record Orbitalprepares the missing sources (<Source>/prepare.jl), checks the prepared files and copies them to $FESMDATA_PRODUCTS/Records/Orbital/ with their text forms (--overwrite to replace them).
Downloads
Download the files with fesmdata.jl into $FESMDATA_PRODUCTS/<Domain>/<GRID>/ (see Download), or one by one from the links below. All released datasets are listed under Products.
Version 2.0.0 (2026-10-15, packages). 2 files, 1.1 MB.
julia fesmdata.jl fetch Orbital Records
Orbital 2 files, 1.1 MB
| Orbital-La2004.nc | 351.3 kB |
| Orbital-La2004.txt | 776.4 kB |
Figures
La2004
