In preparation of the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the IPCC the working group II has specified a list of parameters and scenarios that are required for solving the questions which have to be addressed in Chapter 2 of the report. Several Centres running General Circulation Models (GCM) made their results of climate scenarios available to the community by providing the appropriate data to the IPCC Model Data Archive at PCMDI. A subset of these data is also included into the Data Distribution Center (DDC, http://www.ipcc-data.org ) of the IPCC. Defined by the Task Group on Data and Scenario Support for Impact and Climate Analysis (TGICA), a set of variables which is found to be most interesting to the impact research community is stored in the CERA data base at the M&D Group at the Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg (Germany). These data can directly be accessed from the internet. However for groups that do not have the capability to download these data, a subset is made available on DVD media. Due to the amount of data these service has to be restricted to the core variables of the DDC data sets, to subregions of the globe and a single run even if ensembles are available. First you should check the areas to get to know which area you want to have before you select the appropriate DVD images. Data for a specific area may be distributed over up to 3 DVD (images). Then you may want to download an example data set. There is a little tutorial in which you learn to handle the files. For further information about the models, scenarios and variables you may take a look at this. The data format is grib. These data represent monthly averaged values of selected variables for the Data Distribution Centre (DDC) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (see also http://www.ipcc-data.org/)