Overview of the NASA Pathfinder Dataset

A set of long-term global hydrologic simulations has been carried out to explore the variability of the land surface water and energy budgets. The Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) land surface hydrologic model was driven by near-surface meteorological forcings to produce fields of water and energy fluxes and states, including soil moisture and snow extent.

Understanding the variability of the terrestrial hydrologic cycle is central to determining the potential for extreme events and susceptibility to future change. In the absence of long-term, large-scale observations of the components of the hydrologic cycle, modeling can provide consistent fields of land surface fluxes and states.

The simulations cover the period 1948-2000 at 1.0deg, 3-hourly resolution and provide long-term, globally-consistent datasets of land surface hydrologic variables that can be used for the study of seasonal and inter-annual variability and for the evaluation of coupled models and other land surface prediction schemes.

These data will become accessible from this website in the near future. 3-hourly, daily and monthly fields of water and energy fluxes and states will be available, as well as the forcings and input parameters. This image right shows June precipitation overlayed on Google Earth. Precipitation is downscaled and bias corrected in terms of monthly totals and number of rain days.
	The image left shows global snow depth as simulated by our land surface model and overlayed on Google Earth.