NASA NLDAS Project: North American Land Surface Model Data

NASA NLDAS Project data contains hourly and monthly land surface parameters simulated from the Mosaic and Noah models for North America. The data has a 1/8th-degree grid spacing and ranges from January 1979 to the present. Details about the NLDAS-2 configuration are documented in Xia et al. (2012).

Use Cases

• Modeling soil moisture and temperature dynamics based on the three-layer tile approach described.
• Analyzing long-term trends in evapotranspiration and runoff using the monthly accumulated data.
• Studying subgrid vegetation variability and its impact on surface energy balance.
• Creating climatological baselines for land surface conditions using the 40-year monthly averages.
• Validating other land surface or hydrological models against this assimilated data product.

Strengths

• Long temporal coverage from 1979 to present, providing over 40 years of data.
• High spatial resolution at 1/8th-degree grid spacing for North America.
• Includes multiple temporal resolutions: hourly, monthly, and monthly climatology.
• Based on a documented land-surface model (Mosaic) with a tile approach for subgrid variability.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for specific ML tasks.

Provenance

Source

NASA North American Land Data Assimilation System (NLDAS-2).

Collection Method

Simulated from the Mosaic and Noah land-surface models.

Time Range

January 1979 to present.

Freshness

Data ranges to the present, but the last update date for the dataset listing is unknown.

Geography

North America.