NASA GLDAS-2.1: Global Land Surface Variables, 3-Hourly from 2000

34 land surface fields simulated by NASA's Catchment-F2.5 Land Surface Model from January 2000 to the present. The GLDAS-2.1 3-hourly 1.0 degree product is an Early Product stream, forced with NOAA/GDAS atmospheric analysis, GPCP precipitation, and AGRMET radiation data. This dataset supersedes the corresponding GLDAS-1 products and is archived in NetCDF format.

Use Cases

• Modeling global soil moisture and temperature dynamics based on the 34 land surface fields.
• Analyzing long-term trends in terrestrial water storage and energy fluxes based on the 3-hourly temporal resolution.
• Validating regional climate models using the assimilated meteorological forcing data from NOAA/GDAS and GPCP.
• Studying land surface processes like evapotranspiration and runoff based on the Catchment-F2.5 model outputs.

Strengths

• Provides a temporally consistent series from 2000 to the present, with 3-hourly resolution.
• Contains 34 distinct land surface fields generated by a sophisticated land surface model.
• Integrates multiple high-quality forcing datasets, including NOAA/GDAS analysis and GPCP precipitation.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• This specific product is an 'Early Product' stream with about 1.5 month latency and may be superseded by the main production stream.

Provenance

Source

NASA Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS) Project.

Collection Method

Simulated using the Catchment-F2.5 Land Surface Model within the Land Information System (LIS) Version 7, forced with observational and model data.

Time Range

January 2000 to present.

Freshness

Data is produced with about 1.5 month latency for the Early Product stream and is updated to the present.

Geography

Global at 1.0-degree spatial resolution.