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ISLSCP II Data Sets Released

Submitted by ORNL DAAC Staff on

The ORNL DAAC announces the release of two data sets from the Near-Surface Meteorology category associated with the International Satellite Land-Surface Climatology Project (ISLSCP).

ISLSCP II Climate Research Unit CRU05 Monthly Climate Data. This data set was prepared by M. New, P. Jones, and M. Hulme, and contains a mean monthly climatology for eleven climate variables averaged over the period from 1961 to 1990. These data were originally developed by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) .

ISLSCP II CRU05 Climate Time Series for Global Land Areas, 1986-1995. This data set was also prepared by M. New, P. Jones, and M. Hulme, and contains monthly climate time series data for six climate variables, every year for the period 1985-1995. These data were originally developed by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) .

International Satellite Land-Surface Climatology Project (ISLSCP)

The ISLSCP Initiative II data collection is designed to support modeling studies of the global carbon, water and energy cycle. This data collection contains 50 global time series spanning the ten-year period 1986 to 1995 compiled under the guidance of Forrest Hall and colleagues at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The data for Initiative II were acquired from a number of U.S. and international agencies, universities, and institutions, then co-registered to equal-angle grids of one degree, one-half and one-quarter degree resolution and reformatted into a common ASCII format.

The collection includes a variety of remotely sensed data sets ranging from visible to microwave wavelengths. The data sets also include improved topography, surface radiation, near-surface meteorology, precipitation, runoff, soils, and vegetation data sets that can be used in a variety of interdisciplinary research activities. Several data sets to support global carbon and biogeochemical studies are also provided.

The ORNL DAAC is a NASA-funded data center archiving and distributing terrestrial ecology and biogeochemical dynamics data.