A global 1° by 1° NDVI data set for climate studies. Part 2: The generation of global fields of terrestrial biophysical parameters from the NDVI

Abstract A satellite-based 1° by 1° normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data set has been processed to derive land surface parameters for general circulation models of the atmosphere (GCMs). Prior to calculation of the land surface parameters, corrections were applied to the source NDVI data set to account for (i) obvious anomalies in the data time-series, (ii) the effect of variations in solar zenith angle, (iii) data dropouts in cold regions where a temperature threshold procedure designed to screen for clouds also eliminates cold land surface points, and (iv) persistent cloud cover in the tropics. An outline of the procedures for calculating land surface parameters from the corrected NDVI data set is given, and a brief description is provided of source material that was used in addition to the NDVI data. The data sets summarized in this paper should represent improvements over prescriptions currently used in land surface parameterizations in that the spatial and temporal dynamics of key land surface parameters, in particular of those related to vegetation, are obtained from direct measurements rather than indirectly inferred from survey-based land cover classifications.