The International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project, Initiative II (ISLSCP II) Project was part of the Global Energy and Water Experiment (GEWEX) and was responsible for addressing land-atmosphere interactions, process modeling, data retrieval algorithms, field experiment design and execution, and the development of global data sets. The ISLSCP II data set collection contains about 50 comprehensive data sets over the 10 year period from 1986 through 1995 focused on land cover, hydrometeorology, radiation, and soils.

The ISLSCP II data were acquired from a number of U.S. and international agencies, universities, and institutions, then co-registered to equal-angle grids of one, one-half, and one-quarter degree resolution and reformatted into a common ASCII format.

The ORNL DAAC ISLSCP II Data archive includes data products from the following categories:

• Ancillary data
• Carbon
• Hydrology and Soils
• Near Surface Meteorology
• Radiation and Clouds
• Snow, Sea Ice, and Oceans
• Socioeconomics
• Vegetation