NLDAS-2: Hourly Land Surface Forcing Data for North America at 0.125 Degree

Hourly primary forcing data for the North American Land Data Assimilation System Phase 2 (NLDAS-2), spanning from January 1979 to the present. NASA provides this data set on a 1/8th-degree grid, derived from the North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) with spatial interpolation, temporal disaggregation, and vertical adjustments. Fields include surface pressure, radiation, air temperature, specific humidity, precipitation, and convective potential energy.

Use Cases

• Model land surface hydrology and energy budgets based on hourly forcing fields like temperature and radiation.
• Analyze precipitation patterns and convective activity based on temporally disaggregated gauge and radar-derived data.
• Validate or drive regional climate models using the spatially interpolated and bias-corrected atmospheric variables.
• Study long-term climate trends in North America based on data coverage from 1979 to present.

Strengths

• Long temporal coverage from January 1979 to the present, providing over 40 years of data.
• High spatial resolution at 0.125 degrees and hourly temporal resolution for detailed analysis.
• Data incorporates multiple sophisticated processing steps, including bias correction for shortwave radiation and orographic adjustment for precipitation.

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

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Derived from NCEP North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) fields with spatial interpolation, temporal disaggregation, vertical adjustment, and bias correction.

Time Range

Jan 1979 to present

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-12 23:27:09.555704; freshness should be verified.

Geography

North America