Emission-factor differentiation redistributes global soil nitrous oxide sources and mitigation potential

This dataset provides global gridded soil nitrous oxide (N₂O) emissions for the period 1961–2019, distributed as a stack of annual NetCDF files (N2O_soil_emissions_YYYY.nc), one per year, giving 59 files in total. Each file resolves emissions on a regular 0.5° × 0.5° longitude–latitude mesh (720 longitude columns by 360 latitude rows) covering the full globe. Grid-cell centres are given by the lat (degrees_north) and lon (degrees_east) coordinate variables, with longitude running from −180° to +180°; the environmental-response field was rolled from its native 0–360° convention to −180–180° so that every layer shares this common grid. Ocean and other missing cells are flagged with a fill value of NaN. Within each annual file, emissions are stored as twelve monthly fields (n2o_january through n2o_december) together with an annual total (n2o_annual). The monthly fields report soil N₂O emission per grid cell in grams of N₂O-N per cell per month, and the annual field, expressed in grams of N₂O-N per cell per year, is the sum of the twelve monthly layers. Because the stored values are absolute per-cell masses rather than per-area fluxes, a regional or global total is obtained by summing cells directly and converting from grams to teragrams (dividing the summed grams by 1 × 10¹²). Grid-cell emissions were computed as the product of a fertiliser-driven emission field, an environmental scaling term, and a mean precipitation modifier. Each file preserves the full provenance of this calculation through its global attributes, which record the dataset title, the reference year, the input and output units, the calculation string, the longitude-fix note, and a UTC creation timestamp, so that every layer can be traced back to its inputs and processing steps.