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Full catalog/NLDAS_MOS0125_H
NLDAS_MOS0125_H·v2.0·dataset

Modeled soil and water for North America (hourly, 0.125 deg, Mosaic)

NLDAS Mosaic Land Surface Model L4 Hourly 0.125 x 0.125 degree V2.0 (NLDAS_MOS0125_H) at GES DISC
atmosphere NASA GES_DISC Level 4 active
In plain English

What it measures. Thirty-eight modeled measures of land-surface conditions across North America, such as soil moisture and temperature, evaporation, runoff, and the exchange of water and energy with the air, reported hour by hour.

How it's made. Simulated by the Mosaic land-surface model within the North American Land Data Assimilation System, which splits each grid cell into vegetation tiles each tracking its own water and energy balance.

How & where you'd use it. Supports detailed studies of water and energy at the land surface, drought and flood monitoring, and hydrology research across North America from 1979 onward.

What's measured

ATMOSPHERE › ATMOSPHERIC RADIATION › HEAT FLUXATMOSPHERE › ATMOSPHERIC RADIATION › LONGWAVE RADIATIONATMOSPHERE › ATMOSPHERIC RADIATION › SHORTWAVE RADIATIONATMOSPHERE › ATMOSPHERIC TEMPERATURE › SURFACE TEMPERATUREATMOSPHERE › ATMOSPHERIC WATER VAPOR › WATER VAPOR PROCESSES › EVAPORATIONATMOSPHERE › ATMOSPHERIC WATER VAPOR › WATER VAPOR PROCESSES › EVAPOTRANSPIRATIONATMOSPHERE › PRECIPITATION › LIQUID PRECIPITATION › RAINATMOSPHERE › PRECIPITATION › SOLID PRECIPITATION › SNOWBIOSPHERE › VEGETATION › CANOPY CHARACTERISTICSBIOSPHERE › VEGETATION › LEAF CHARACTERISTICSBIOSPHERE › VEGETATION › VEGETATION COVERLAND SURFACE › SOILS › SOIL MOISTURE/WATER CONTENTLAND SURFACE › SOILS › SOIL TEMPERATURELAND SURFACE › SURFACE RADIATIVE PROPERTIES › ALBEDO

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span1979-01-02 → ongoing
  • Measured byMosaic-LSM (NOT APPLICABLE)
  • Processing levelLevel 4
  • Spatial extent-125, 25, -67, 53
  • StatusACTIVE

What you can do with it

  • Map air pollutants — NO₂, aerosols, ozone
  • Track greenhouse gases and Earth's energy budget
  • Feed weather and air-quality analysis
Official description

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).

Get the data

nldas_mos0125_h_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="NLDAS_MOS0125_H",
    version="2.0",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from GES_DISC
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.