The International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) was based at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. ISCCP was sponsored by the World Climate Research Programme for the purpose of "collecting and analyzing satellite radiance measurements to infer the global distribution of cloud radiative properties and their diurnal and seasonal variations".

This dataset collection contains the global three-hourly cloud products (ISCCP-D1), global monthly cloud products (ISCCP-D2), using the revised algorithm, at 280 km spatial resolution and and monthly cloud analysis products (ISCCP-C2) at 250 km spatial resolution.

There are more than 200 variables contained within the datasets.

Note - that that the temporal range of the datasets presented here are contain data available from the NASA Atmospheric Science Data Center (ASDC) covers the full extent available at the time of the dataset publication in the CEDA archives, begin in July 1983 and extend through to December 1999 (D1), 2006 (D2) and 1990 (C1). Fuller versions of the datasets are available from ASDC directly. These limited copies were obtained to aid researcher access within the UK community at the time.