NASA Global Land Data Assimilation System Version 2 (GLDAS-2) has three components: GLDAS-2.0, GLDAS-2.1, and GLDAS-2.2. GLDAS-2.0 is forced entirely with the Princeton meteorological forcing input data and provides a temporally consistent series from 1948 through 2014. GLDAS-2.1 is forced with a combination of model and observation data from 2000 to present. GLDAS-2.2 product suites use data assimilation (DA), whereas the GLDAS-2.0 and GLDAS-2.1 products are "open-loop" (i.e., no data assimilation). The choice of forcing data, as well as DA observation source, variable, and scheme, vary for different GLDAS-2.2 products.

This data set, GLDAS-2.0 0.25 degree daily, contains a series of land surface parameters simulated from the Catchment Land Surface Model 3.6, and currently covers from January 1948 to December 2014.

The GLDAS-2.0 model simulations were initialized on January 1, 1948, using soil moisture and other state fields from the LSM climatology for that day of the year. The simulations were forced by the global meteorological forcing data set from Princeton University (Sheffield et al., 2006). Each simulation uses the common GLDAS data sets for land water mask (MOD44W: Carroll et al., 2009) and elevation (GTOPO30) along with the model default land cover and soils datasets. Catchment model uses the Mosaic land cover classification and soils, topographic, and other model-specific parameters were derived in a consistent manner as in the NASA/GMAO’s GEOS-5 climate modeling system. The MODIS based land surface parameters are used in the current GLDAS-2.0 and GLDAS-2.1 products.

The GLDAS-2.0 data are archived and distributed in netCDF format.