| The characteristics of eight global soil wetness products, three produced by land surface model calculations, three from coupled land-atmosphere model reanalyses, and two from microwave remote sensing estimates, have been examined. The goal of this study is to determine whether there exists an optimal data set for the initialization of the land surface component of global weather and climate forecast models. We validate their abilities to simulate the phasing of the annual cycle and to accurately represent interannual variability in soil wetness by comparing to available in situ measurements. Because soil wetness climatologies vary greatly among land surface models, and models have different operating ranges for soil wetness (i.e., very different mean... |
