preindustrial Control experiment to be used in VolMIP analyses. The piControl experiment is the CMIP6-DECK piControl experiment described in Eyring et al. (2016). piControl provides initial climate states that are sampled to start most of VolMIP experiments (Zanchettin et al., 2016). The dataset contains monthly values of selected variables spatially averaged over four regions. These are the full globe (GL), the Northern Hemisphere extratropics (30°-90°N, NH), the tropics (30°S-30°N, TR), and the Southern Hemisphere (30°-90°S, hereafter SH). The considered variables have the following cmor names: hfls, hfss, pr, rlds, rldscs, rlus, rlut, rlutcs, rsds, rsdscs, rsdt, rsus, rsut, rsutcs, tas. Additionally, the climate indices NAO and Nino34 are part of the dataset. Considered models are CanESM5, IPSL-CM6A-LR, GISS-E2.1-G, MIROC-ES2L, MPI-ESM1.2-LR (named MPI-ESM-LR in the files of this dataset) and UKESM1. Considered experiments are piControl and volc-pinatubo-full, with initial date and final date as specified for each model in Zanchettin et al. (2021). Different realizations are considered for the participating models depending on availability.