Three Data Sets from the ISLSCP Initiative II Snow, Sea Ice, and Oceans Data Collection Released

The ORNL DAAC announces the release of three data sets within the Snow, Sea Ice, and Oceans category of the International Satellite Land-Surface Climatology Project (ISLSCP), Initiative II (ISLSCP II).

The ISLSCP Initiative II data collection is designed to support modeling studies of the global carbon, water and energy cycle. This data collection contains 50 global time series spanning the ten-year period 1986 to 1995 compiled under the guidance of Forrest Hall and colleagues at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The data for Initiative II were acquired from a number of U.S. and international agencies, universities, and institutions, then co-registered to equal-angle grids of one degree, one-half and one-quarter degree resolution and reformatted into a common ASCII format.

The collection includes a variety of remotely sensed data sets ranging from visible to microwave wavelengths. The data sets also include improved topography, surface radiation, near-surface meteorology, precipitation, runoff, soils, and vegetation data sets that can be used in a variety of interdisciplinary research activities. Several data sets to support global carbon and biogeochemical studies are also provided.

The ORNL DAAC is a NASA-funded data center archiving and distributing terrestrial ecology and biogeochemical dynamics data.