3.2 Observational data
The 2-m temperature data consisted of the 0.5° × 0.5° land temperature data compiled by Cort Willmott and Kenji Matsuura of the University of Delaware from a large number of stations from Global Historical Climate Network and the archive of Legates and Willmott (Willmott and Matsuura 2001). The precipitation observations were obtained from CMAP, which are from the Climate Prediction Center (CPC) Merged Analysis of Precipitation 1979–2009 monthly time series, which have a resolution of 2.5° × 2.5° (Xie and Arkin 1997). The latent heat observational data were from FLUXNET-MTE (Jung et al. 2009, 2010). The FLUXNET-MTE data were from the FLUXNET network of eddy covariance towers, which were upscaled to monthly data on a 0.5° × 0.5° grid (Jung et al. 2010) using the model tree ensemble (MTE) approach described by Jung et al. (2009) (1982–2004 average). For the soil moistures, the Global Land Data Assimilation System version 2 (GLDAS 2) data were used (Rodell et al. 2004). The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) all-sky albedos were derived from the black-sky (direct) and white-sky (diffuse) near-infrared and visible wave band albedos by weighting them according to the CAS-LSM partitioning of solar radiation into these components. The MODIS data were from collection 4, which were the climatological average of the years 2001–2003.