The ORNL DAAC announces the release of two data sets from the International Satellite Land-Surface Climatology Project (ISLSCP) Initiative II.
ISLSCP II Land and Water Masks with Ancillary Data . This data set, prepared by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, contains the ISLSCP II fixed land/water masks and percentages of land or water in each cell. There are seven data files: four produced from a 1-km land/water mask compiled at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in support of NASA's Earth Observing System; two files of a land outline overlay created from the land/water mask files created at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center; and one file which is a latitude grid coordinate file and longitude grid coordinate file produced by the ISLSCP II staff. All of these data are provided at three spatial resolutions of .25, 0.5 and 1-degree in latitude and longitude and on a common Earth grid.
ISLSCP II Surface Radiation Budget (SRB) Radiation Data . This data set, prepared by P.W. Stackhouse and S.K. Gupta, contains global Surface Radiation Budget (SRB) and a few top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiation budget parameters on a 1-degree x 1-degree spatial resolution. These parameters are provided as monthly, monthly-3 hourly (i.e. monthly average for a particular 3 hourly period) and 3-hourly averages. All monthly parameters include files with a monthly mean value, a monthly standard deviation, and monthly minimum and maximum values.
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.