Developing Earth System Data Records for the Global Terrestrial Water Cycle with Support from Satellite Missions
Pan, Ming1; Sahoo, Alok1; Sheffield, Justin1; Houser, Paul2; MacCracken, Rosalyn2; Lettenmaier, Dennis3; Gao, Huilin3; Pinker, Rachel4; Kummerow, Christian5; Bytheway, Janice5
1Princeton University, UNITED STATES; 2George Mason University, UNITED STATES; 3University of Washington, UNITED STATES; 4University of Maryland, UNITED STATES; 5Colorado State University, UNITED STATES

As a key part of the U. S. National Aeronautic and Space Administration's (NASA) Making Earth Science Data Records for Use in Research Environments (MEaSUREs) program, the project "Development of Consistent Earth System Data Records for the Global Terrestrial Water Cycle" aims to derive global, long term, consistent Earth System Data Records (ESDR) for terrestrial water cycle states and variables by updating and extending existing observational and modeled datasets of long-term hydrologic fluxes and states. The project is a large scale multi-institutional effort to create long-term global datasets for critical researches in many areas of Earth sciences. This effort has been greatly supported and facilitated by numerous direct and derived data products from a large number of satellite missions. The global water cycle reanalysis has been carried out using improved algorithms and newly available satellite datasets of radiation, precipitation, evapotranspiration, and soil moisture. The analysis is extended to reflect the effects of global water management, by incorporating reservoir storage and irrigation. Now the project is delivering all 7 major ESDR's to the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences (GES) Data and Information Services Center (DISC), including (1) Global 0.25† land surface model forcing fields for 1948-2010; (2) Global 0.25° land surface model derived water cycle variables for 1948-2010; (3) Global 0.5° satellite radiation fields for 1983-2009; (4) Global water management; (5) Global 0.25° satellite soil moisture for 1998-2011; (6) Global 0.5° satellite evapotranspiration for 1983-2009; and (7) Global 0.25° satellite precipitation.