This data set contains thirty-eight fields simulated from the Mosaic land-surface model (LSM) for Phase 2 of the North American Land Data Assimilation System (NLDAS-2). The data are in 1/8th degree grid spacing and range from Jan 1979 to the present. The temporal resolution is hourly. The file format is netCDF (converted from the GRIB format).
Mosaic was developed by Koster and Suarez (1994, 1996) to account for subgrid vegetation variability with a tile approach. Each vegetation tile carries its own energy and water balance and soil moisture and temperature. Each tile has three soil layers, with the first two in the root zone. In NLDAS, Mosaic is configured to support a maximum of 10 tiles per grid cell with a 5% cutoff that ignores vegetation classes covering less than 5% of the cell. Additionally in NLDAS, all tiles of Mosaic in a grid cell have a predominant soil type and three soil layers with fixed thickness values of 10, 30, and 160 cm (hence constant rooting depth of 40 cm and constant total column depth of 200 cm).
Details about the NLDAS-2 configuration of the Mosaic LSM can be found in Xia et al. (2012).