International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project - Initiative I data collection (ISLSCP I)

The International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project (ISLSCP) was established in 1983 under the United Nation's Environmental Programme to promote the use of satellite data for the global land surface data sets needed for climate studies.

In June of 1992, an interdisciplindary Earth Science workshop was convened in Columbia, Maryland, to assess recent progress in land-atmosphere research, specifically in the areas of models, satellite data algorithms, and field experiments. At the workshop, representatives of the land-atmosphere modeling community stated that they had a need for global data sets to prescribe boundary conditions, initialize state variables, and provide near-surface meteorological and radiative forcings for their models. The data sets collated on these CDs represent a first attempt to meet this need.

This CD-ROM contains the Initiative I data collection. The data sets on this CD set cover four areas (land cover, hydrometeorology, radiation, and soils), span the 24 month period, 1987-1988, and all but one are mapped to a common spatial resolution and grid (1° x 1°). Temporal resolution for most data sets is monthly; however, a few are at a finer resolution (e.g., 6-hourly). The data within the four areas are organized into five groups on this CD set:

1. Vegetation
2. Hydrology and Soils
3. Snow, Ice, and Oceans
4. Radiation and Clouds
5. Near-Surface Meteorology

The data within each of these areas were acquired from a variety of sources including model output, satellites, and ground measurements. The individual data sets were provided in a variety of forms. In some cases this required the data publication team to regrid and reformat data sets and in others to produce monthly averages from finer resolution data. The specific handling for each data set is detailed in the documentation. The regridded, reformatted, integrated, and peer reviewed data sets are published on this five-volume CD collection.

While ISLSCP Inititative I covers 2 years (1987 and 1988), ISLSCP Inititative II spans a 10-year period for 1986 to 1995.

The vegetation; hydrology and soils; snow, ice, and oceans; and radiation and clouds data are all found on Volume 1 of the set, while the near-surface meteorology data span Volumes 2-5.

The data files and documents are written in ASCII format. However some data files are UNIX compressed (.z) and must be decompressed before they can be used (Software supplied).

The documentation on the CD-ROM has been extracted and indexed and made available through this WWW interface. This gives an outline of the project and a description of the data sets.

The latest information on issues with the dataset is available from NASA. Changes made to the BADC archive are detailed on the dataset status page.

A list of references has been extracted from the CD-Rom.

There are a number of sites on the World Wide Web which hold information about the International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project Data.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Goddard Space Flight Center [Sellers, P.J.; Meeson, B.W.; Closs, J.; Collatz, J.; Corprew, F.; Dazlich, D.; Hall, F.G.; Kerr, Y.; Koster, R.; Los, S.; Mitchell, K.; McManus, J.; Myers, D.; Sun, K.-J.; Try, P.]. International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project - Initiative I data collection (ISLSCP I), [Internet]. NASA Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC), 1996, Date of citation. Available from http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/view/badc.nerc.ac.uk__ATOM__dataent_ISLSCP

If you would like to obtain a copy of the CD-ROMs you should contact the Goddard DAAC Help Desk. The ISLSCP Initiative I CD set is available free of charge from the DAAC. You can order the CD set directly through the WEB. General queries about these pages or browsing the data should be directed to the BADC support line.