Matthews' global vegetation DB for climate studies

The Matthews Vegetation data set comes from a global map of vegetation types, which was compiled from up to 100 existing map sources at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), Columbia University, in New York. It shows the predominant vegetation type (one out of 32 classes) within each one degree-square latitude/longitude grid cell. Matthews Cultivation Intensity data set is based on existing maps of vegetation and satellite imagery, and it shows the percentage of each one-degree square latitude/longitude grid cell that is under cultivation, versus the percentage of natural vegetation, including five classes.

Matthews Seasonal Integrated Albedo data set includes four data files for Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn (January, April, July and October respectively in the Northern Hemisphere; and July, October, January and April for the Southern Hemisphere). They show the seasonal percentage of incoming radiation reflected into space, integrated across the electro- magnetic spectrum. These are based on the vegetation and cultivation intensity maps, rather than being measured directly, and are for snow- free conditions except for permanently snow-covered continental ice.

The proper reference to these data sets is "Matthews, E., 1983. Global vegetation and land use: new high resolution data bases for climate studies, Journal of Climate and Applied Meteorology, volume 22, pp. 474-487."

The Matthews Vegetation, Cultivation Intensity and Seasonal Albedo data files have a spatial resolution of one degree latitude/longitude, are one byte/eight bits per pixel, and consist of 180 rows (lines) by 360 columns (elements/pixels/samples) of data. Their origin point is at 90 degrees North latitude and 180 degrees West longitude, and they extend to 90 degrees South latitude and 180 degrees East longitude. At one degree resolution, each of these data files comprises 64.8 kilobytes.