The Pilot Phase of the Global Soil Wetness Project
Abstract The Global Soil Wetness Project (GSWP) is an ongoing land surface modeling activity of the International Satellite Land-Surface Climatology Project (ISLSCP), a part of the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment. The pilot phase of GSWP deals with the production of a two-year global dataset of soil moisture, temperature, runoff, and surface fluxes by integrating uncoupled land surface schemes (LSSs) using externally specified surface forcings from observations and standardized soil and vegetation distributions. Approximately one dozen participating LSS groups in five nations have taken the common ISLSCP forcing data to drive their state-of-the-art models over the 1987–88 period to generate global datasets. Many of the LSS groups have performed specific sensitivity studies, which are intended to evaluate the impact of uncertainties in model parameters and forcing fields on simulation of the surface water and energy balances. A validation effort exists to compare the global products to other forms...