Monthly average data from Community Earth System Model version 2 needed to reproduce analysis in "Aquaplanets as a framework for examination of aerosol effects" (https://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2019MS001874). Each file contains several monthly averaged fields with dimensions of time, latitude, and longitude; some fields also have a vertical level dimension (lev). All simulations used the finite volume dynamical core with a 0.9° latitude by 1.25° longitude grid and 32 vertical hybrid-sigma levels. Files are divided by simulation, with the beginning of the file name indicating the experiment: glb_qpc6_cesm2p1p2.nc -- aquaplanet, pre-industrial emissions uniformly distributed hemi_qpc6_cesm2p1p2.nc -- aquaplanet, pre-industrial emissions in northern hemisphere quad_qpc6_cesm2p1p2.nc -- aquaplanet, pre-industrial emissions in northern hemisphere, 0-90° longitude salt_qpc6_cesm2p1p2.nc -- aquaplanet, no emissions except diagnostic sea-salt trop_qpc6_cesm2p1p2.nc -- aquaplanet, pre-industrial emissions in tropics (-30°-30° latitude) wedge_qpc6_cesm2p1p2.nc -- aquaplanet, pre-industrial emissions 0-30° longitude xtrop_qpc6_cesm2p1p2.nc -- aquaplanet, pre-industrial emissions poleward of 30° PD_emis_qpc6_cesm2p1p2.nc -- aquaplanet, year 2000 emissions PI_emis_qpc6_cesm2p1p2.nc -- aquaplanet, realistic pre-industrial emissions amip_F2000_cesm2.nc -- Earth configuration, year 2000 SST, year 2000 aerosol emissions amip_PI_F2000_cesm2.nc -- Earth configuration, year 2000 SST, pre-industrial aerosol emissions Files are netCDF4 using compression. They were produced from model-native netCDF3 monthly files using NCO to concatenate months for the selected variables.