Global Soil Wetness Project (GSWP)

The Global Soil Wetness Project (GSWP) estimates global soil water by using miscellaneous land surface process model and atmospheric data. GSWP is an ongoing modeling activity of the International Satellite Land-Surface Climatology Project (ISLSCP), a contributing project of the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX). The GSWP is charged with producing a 2-year global data set of soil moisture, temperature, runoff, and surface fluxes by integrating one-way uncoupled land surface process models (LSPs) using externally specified surface forcings and standardized soil and vegetation distributions, namely, the ISLSCP Initiative I CD-ROM data ("http://daac.gsfc.nasa.gov/") Approximately one dozen participating LSP groups in five nations have taken the common ISLSCP forcing data to execute their state-of-the-art models over the 1987-1988 period to generate global data sets.