A History and Review of the Global Soil Wetness Project (GSWP)

Abstract

Abstract The Global Soil Wetness Project (GSWP) is an international land surface modeling research effort involving dataset production, validation, model comparison, and scientific investigation in the areas of land surface hydrology and climatology. GSWP is characterized by the integration of multiple land surface models on a latitude–longitude grid in a stand-alone uncoupled mode, driven by meteorological forcing data constructed by combining atmospheric analyses and gridded observed data products. The models produce time series of gridded estimates of land surface fluxes and state variables that are then studied and compared. Defining characteristics that have distinguished GSWP include its global scale, application of land surface models in the same gridded structure as they are used in weather and climate models, and the multimodel approach, which included production of a multimodel analysis in its second phase. This paper gives an overview of the history of GSWP beginning with its inception within the International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project. Various phases of the project are described, and a review of scientific results stemming from the project is presented. Musings on future directions of research are also discussed.