Spatiotemporally consistent global dataset of the GIMMS Leaf Area Index (GIMMS LAI4g) from 1982 to 2020 (V1.1)

Brief Introduction: The fourth generation GIMMS Leaf Area Index product (GIMMS LAI4g, version 1.1) provides spatiotemporally consistent global LAI data in half-month and 1/12° from 1982 to 2020. It is created to address two major uncertainties presented in current global long-term LAI products, i.e., (1) the effects of NOAA satellite orbital drift and AVHRR sensor degradation and (2) insufficient LAI reference data to build robust LAI model particularly before the late 1990s. The GIMMS LAI4g was generated based on biome-specific BPNN models that employed the latest PKU GIMMS NDVI product and 3.6 million high-quality global Landsat LAI samples. It was then consolidated with the Reprocess MODIS LAI to extend the temporal coverage to 2020 via a pixel-wise Random Forests fusion method. The GIMMS LAI4g exhibits overall high accuracy and low underestimation evaluated by field LAI measurements and Landsat LAI samples. It efficiently eliminated the effects of satellite orbital drift and sensor degradation and presents a good temporal consistency before and after the year 2000 and a more reasonable global vegetation trend. It could potentially facilitate mitigating the disagreements between studies of the long-term global vegetation changes and benefit the model development in Earth and environmental sciences. Here we provide two versions of GIMMS LAI4g for download, one solely based on AVHRR data (1982−2015) and the other consolidated with the Reprocess MODIS LAI (1982−2020) Dataset Characteristics: Spatial Coverage: 180ºW~180ºE, 63ºS~90ºN Projection: Geographic Spatial Resolution: 1/12 degree Temporal Resolution: Half month Temporal Coverage: January 1982 to December 2020 Image Dimension: Rows-2160; Columns-4320 Units: m2/m2 Fill Value: 65535 Data Type: uint16 Valid Range: 0-7000 Scale Factor: 0.001 File Format: TIFF(.tif) File Size: ~8Mb each file References: Cao, S., Li, M., Zhu, Z., Zha, J., Zhao, W., Duanmu, Z., Chen, J., Zheng, Y., and Chen, Y.: Spatiotemporally consistent global dataset of the GIMMS Leaf Area Index (GIMMS LAI4g) from 1982 to 2020, Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss. [preprint], https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-68, in review, 2023