The files here are compiled historical experiment timeseries. They were compiled for use as part of the CMIP7 ScenarioMIP exercise and are primarily used for supporting emissions harmonisation. Here, 'harmonisation' means alignment of modelled emissions from IAMs with the emissions used for the CMIP7 historical experiment.

As a result, they are a key input for the process of 'gridding' emissions (i.e. taking raw emissions from IAMs and assigning them to a spatial grid, ready for use by Earth System Models (ESMs)) and for running the simple climate model based assessment of the scenarios to derive a first-order estimate of the warming associated with these scenarios (the ESMs will quantify the warming and other climate change associated with these scenarios as part of ScenarioMIP, and this quantification is underpinned by a deeper, more physically-based set of modelling assumptions.)

There are three different files, provided in three different formats each. The three files are:

gridding-history*: the history used for harmonisation at the 'gridding' level. The gridding requires emissions with regional and sectoral detail. It also has to support every IAMs' native regions. As a result, there are lots (of order 30 000) timeseries.
country-history*: same as above, but at the country level rather than in native IAM regions.
global-workflow-history*: the history used for harmonisation at the 'global' level. This only has global total emissions, except for CO2 which is split into fossil-based and land-based (i.e. originating from the land carbon pool) emissions. It includes a number of species that are not used in the gridding workflow but are relevant for climate projections e.g. all of the greenhouse gases covered by the Montreal Protocol. As a result, there are only 52 timeseries.
The files were derived using the code in this repository: https://github.com/iiasa/emissions_harmonization_historical. The filenames are composed of identifiers related to the processing of each of the different input data sources. To identify the exact meaning of these identifiers, please see the processing code in https://github.com/iiasa/emissions_harmonization_historical.