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 VIC 3-hourly 1.0 degree, contains a series of land surface variables simulated simulated with the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) 4.1.2 Land Surface Model in Land Information System (LIS) Version 7. The data set currently cover from January 1948 to December 2014, but will be extended as the forcing data becomes available. The GLDAS-2.0 data are archived and distributed in netCDF format.

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.

In October 2020, all 3-hourly and monthly GLDAS-2 data were post-processed with the MOD44W MODIS land mask. Previously, some grid boxes over inland water were considered as over land and, thus, had non-missing values. The post-processing corrected this issue and masked out all model output data over inland water; the post-processing did not affect the meteorological forcing variables. More information can be found in the GLDAS-2 README. The MOD44W MODIS land mask is available on the GLDAS Project site.

If you had downloaded the GLDAS data prior to November 2020, please download the data again to receive the post-processed data.