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VEMAP 1: U.S. Climate, 1961-1990

Metadata Updated: January 15, 2026

The Vegetation/Ecosystem Modeling and Analysis Project (VEMAP) is an ongoing multiinstitutional, international effort addressing the response of biogeography and biogeochemistry to environmental variability in climate and other drivers in both space and time domains. The objectives of VEMAP are the intercomparison of biogeochemistry models and vegetation type distribution models (biogeography models) and determination of their sensitivity to changing climate, elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, and other sources of altered forcing. The VEMAP climate data set includes daily, monthly, and annual climate data for the conterminous U.S. including maximum, minimum, and mean temperature, precipitation, solar radiation, and humidity. Seasonal mean surface wind speed is also provided. The monthly, seasonal, and annual data are long-term climatological means and are on the CDROM and FTP site under the subdirectory /monthly. Annual averages are simple means of the 12 monthly fluxes. The daily set presents a "characteristic year" in which monthly averages or accumulations of the daily values match the long-term monthly climatology but where the daily series has variances and covariances characteristic of a station's weather record. The daily data are on the CDROM and FTP site in the subdirectory /daily. A complete users guide to the VEMAP Phase I database which includes more information about this data set can be found at ftp://daac.ornl.gov/data/vemap-1/comp/Phase_1_User_Guide.pdf. ORNL DAAC maintains additional information associated with the VEMAP Project. Data Citation: This data set should be cited as follows: Kittel, T. G. F., N. A. Rosenbloom, T. H. Painter, D. S. Schimel, H. H. Fisher, A. Grimsdell, VEMAP Participants, C. Daly, and E. R. Hunt, Jr. 2002. VEMAP Phase I Database, revised. Available on-line from Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, U.S.A.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date April 11, 2025
Metadata Updated Date January 15, 2026

Metadata Source

Harvested from NASA Data.json

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date April 11, 2025
Metadata Updated Date January 15, 2026
Publisher ORNL_DAAC
Maintainer
Identifier 10.3334/ORNLDAAC/224
Data Last Modified 2026-01-13
Category Earth Science
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 026:00
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 8caee1a8-bb6d-4a89-87ca-1c800a1ee739
Harvest Source Id 58f92550-7a01-4f00-b1b2-8dc953bd598f
Harvest Source Title NASA Data.json
Homepage URL https://search.earthdata.nasa.gov/search?q=vemap-1_climate_224&ac=true
Old Spatial {"WestBoundingCoordinate":-124.5,"NorthBoundingCoordinate":49.0,"EastBoundingCoordinate":-67.0,"SouthBoundingCoordinate":25.0},"CARTESIAN"
Program Code 026:000
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 17163fd1406d6071c4aa07c71e15d37cc53745836acf95a04328bd8832bdfe20
Source Schema Version 1.1
Spatial
Temporal 1961-01-01/1961-01-01

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