ISLSCP Initiative II global data sets: Surface boundary conditions and atmospheric forcings for land‐atmosphere studies

Abstract

We report herein the publication and evaluation of the International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project (ISLSCP) Initiative II global interdisciplinary data record. The record consists of 52 data sets, with a common series in the 10‐year period 1985 to 1996. Selected data series extend well beyond this period. All series are coregistered to a common grid and gap‐filled for continuity using uniform procedures. We describe briefly the individual data sets within the collection; provide user guidance; and contrast, compare and evaluate those data sets containing similar parameters (land cover, NDVI, albedo, precipitation and near‐surface meteorology). We also describe the process used to develop the Initiative II collection which involved a broad international scientific community focused on addressing a well‐defined set of carbon, water and energy cycle questions within the context of a specific set of analysis tools. The communities that drove the definition of the Initiative II collection were investigators within the international scientific communities of the Global Energy and Water cycle Experiment, GEWEX, program (http://www.gewex.org/); the International Geosphere/Biosphere Program IGBP (http://www.igbp.kva.se); and the U.S. Global Change Research Program, USGCRP (http://www.usgcrp.gov/). Finally, we report usage statistics based on access and download of files from the ISLSCP Initiative II collection available at http://www.daac.ornl.gov.

Operational surface UV radiation product from GOME-2 and AVHRR/3 data

“…Northern hemispheric monthly snow cover extent data (Armstrong and Brodzik, 2010) from the International Satellite Land-Surface Climatology Project, Initiative II (ISLSCP II) (Hall et al, 2006) together with the monthly masks of maximum sea ice extent derived by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) from the sea ice concentrations obtained from passive microwave data (Cavalieri et al, 1996) were used to determine the days of year when snow or ice was present in each grid cell. The monthly Minimum Lambert Equivalent Reflectivity (MLER) climatology (Herman and Celarier, 1997) is then used for regions and time periods with permanent or negligible snow/ice cover while a climatology better capturing the seasonal changes in the surface albedo during the snow/ice melting and formation periods (Tanskanen et al, 2004) is used elsewhere.…”

Description and validation of the Simple, Efficient, Dynamic, Global, Ecological Simulator (SEDGES v.1.0)

“…This value yields soil bucket depths that are a reasonably good fit with a plant-available water dataset based on optimal rooting depths (Kleidon and Heimann, 1998;Hall et al, 2006;Kleidon, 2011). In that dataset, the soil bucket depths in the most sparsely vegetated regions range from around 0.05 m in the Canadian polar desert to < 0.003 m in the hyperarid Atacama and northeast Sahara deserts.…”

“…2.3.2) gives generally much lower values (not shown) in the wet and dry tropics than in the reference dataset (Kleidon and Heimann, 1998;Hall et al, 2006;Kleidon, 2011). Such lower values of soil waterholding capacity should lead one to expect a positive runoff bias in these areas in SEDGES.…”

“…The ISLSCP II tree cover dataset (DeFries and Hansen, 2009) is available from https://daac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/dsviewer.pl?ds_id=931. The rooting zone plant-available soil water storage capacity dataset (Kleidon and Heimann, 1998;Hall et al, 2006;Kleidon, 2011) is available from the following URL: https://daac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/ dsviewer.pl?ds_id=1006. Accessing these last two datasets requires registering and signing in.…”

Development of a remotely sensing seasonal vegetation‐based Palmer Drought Severity Index and its application of global drought monitoring over 1982–2011

“…Global 1°gridded data set of 18 selected soil parameters including maximum soil available water content (M awc ) for a soil depth of 0-150 cm, downloaded from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center (ORNL DAAC) (http://daac.ornl.gov/) by this study, was developed by the International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project (ISLSCP) Initiative II project based on the International GeosphereBiosphere Programme-Data and Information Services soil data [Hall et al, 2006].…”