National Climate Assessment - Land Data Assimilation System (NCA-LDAS) Data at NASA GES DISC

Abstract:

As part of NASA’s active participation in the Interagency National Climate Assessment (NCA) program, the Goddard Space Flight Center’s Hydrological Sciences Laboratory (HSL) is supporting an Integrated Terrestrial Water Analysis, by using NASA’s Land Information System (LIS) and Land Data Assimilation System (LDAS) capabilities. The resulting system, the NCA - Land Data Assimilation System (NCA-LDAS), is a NASA contribution to the NCA. The outputs of the NCA-LDAS contribute to the development and evaluation of a suite of water indicators. To maximize the benefit of the NCA-LDAS, on completion of planned model runs and uncertainty analysis, NASA will provide open access to all NCA-LDAS components, including input data, output fields, and validation data, to other NCA-teams and the general public. Currently released data include NCA-LDAS outputs from the Noah Land Surface Model version 3.3 (Noah-3.3) and Catchment Land Surface Model version Fortuna-2.5 (CLSM-F2.5) and the post- processed data sets for the routing variables. The NCA-LDAS data have temporal and spatial resolutions, respectively, of daily and 0.125x0.125 degree, covering North America (25N ~ 53N; 125W ~ 67W) and the period January 1979 to December 2012. The data files are in self-describing, machine-independent netCDF-4 format. The data contain a set of water- and energy-related Essential Climate Variables (ECV). The NCA-LDAS data are archived at the NASA GES DISC (Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center) and can be accessed via direct ftp (ftp://hydro1.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/s4pa/NCA_LDAS), THREDDS (http://hydro1.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/thredds/catalog.html), and Mirador search and download (http://mirador.gsfc.nasa.gov/). This presentation describes the main characteristics of the NCA-LDAS data and data services (access, subsetting, visualization, and analysis). The major differences between the NCA-LDAS data and the North American Land Data Assimilation System (NLDAS) data are discussed as well. Data for the suite of water indicators will also be available from the GES DISC Hydrology Data Holdings (http://disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/hydrology/data-holdings).