The Global Grid of Probabilities of Urban Expansion to 2030 presents spatially explicit probabilistic forecasts of global urban land cover change from 2000 to 2030 at a 2.5 arc-minute resolution. For each grid cell that is non-urban in 2000, a Monte-Carlo model assigned a probability of becoming urban by the year 2030. The authors first extracted urban extent circa 2000 from the NASA MODIS Land Cover Type Product Version 5, which provides a conservative estimate of global urban land cover. The authors then used population densities from the Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project, Version 1 (GRUMPv1) to create the population density driver map. They estimated the amount of new urban land in each United Nations region by 2030 in a Monte-Carlo fashion based on present empirical distribution of regional urban population densities and probability density functions of projected regional population and GDP values for 2030. To facilitate integration with other data products, CIESIN reprojected the data from Goode's Homolosine to Geographic WGS84 projection. We recommend using the Goode Homolosine equal area projection for data analysis. NOTES CONCERNING THE DATA Although regions were not excluded in the creation of these data some small urban areas, such as Tromso and Norilsk, are missing. This is a result of resampling the input land-cover data from 463 meters to 5 kilometers as described in the documentation. ACCESSING THE DATA The data may be downloaded via the World Wide Web at http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/set/lulc-global-grid-prob-urban-expansion-2030. The data are available in a compressed zipfile of GeoTIFF format. The downloaded files need to be uncompressed in a single folder using either WinZip (Windows file compression utility) or a similar application before it can be accessed by your GIS software package. DATA FORMAT Two files containing probability of urban expansion grids in GeoTIFF format are available in the download. The WGS84 archive is in geographic coordinates of decimal degrees based on the World Geodetic System spheroid of 1984. The Goode Homolosine archive is in projected coordinates based on the pseudocylindrical, equal-area, composite map, Goode Homolosine projection. File naming convention: urban-expansion-2000-to-2030-wgs84 WGS 1984, with 0.048125633 decimal degree resolution urban-expansion-2000-to-2030-goode Goode Homolosine, with 5 kilometer resolution EPSG:3857