The dataset consists of satellite retrievals from CERES and MODIS, providing global distributions at 1° horizontal resolution for the period 2002–2020, which we aggregated into monthly averages.References for variables: Loeb et al. (2018); Platnick et al. (2015); Levy et al. (2017); Schaaf & Wang (2015); Kilpatrick et al. (2015); Wan et al. (2015). Descriptions of the variables are provided in Clément et al. (2026), and in its Supporting Information. Variables are: year [2002;2020]month [1;12]lon longitude (°) [-179.5°;179.5°]cos_time cos(2pi*month/12)sin_time sin(2pi*month/12)lat latitude (°) [-89.5°;89.5°]cos_lon cos(longitude)sin_lon sin(longitude)mask mask from Quaas et al. (2022), 0 or 1land_sea_mask % of sea in a 1°*1° grid boxsurface_temperature (°C) surface_albedo [0;1]od_aer aerosol optical depthlwp liquid water path (g/m2)clt cloud fraction ([0;1])scdnc column-integrated cloud droplet number (/m2), following Quaas et al. (2006)TOA_sw_clear_sky_monthly reflected SW flux at TOA (clear-sky) (W/m2)TOA_sw_monthly reflected SW flux at TOA (all-sky) (W/m2)albedo_TOA_clear_sky TOA albedo clear-sky ([0;1])albedo_TOA TOA albedo all-sky ([0;1])