The objective of this dataset is to provide a global continental precipitation time series of relatively high temporal frequency. Its purpose is to fulfill the precipitation forcing needs of the various land-surface/hydrology initiatives of the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX), including ISLSCP, GCIP, GNEP, and PILPS.

One chief application is in the initiative of the GEWEX Global Soil Wetness Workshop (4-6 Oct 1994, Longmont, Colorado), which enlisted a number of international land-surface modeling groups to utilize the same global, continental atmospheric forcing data as input to various land-surface process models to generate a set of global soil wetness estimates for use in global climate models and other applications. A good discussion of the need for and approach to a global soil wetness initiative is given by Dirmeyer (1995) in his summary of a related forerunner meeting on soil wetness (COLA, 19 Aug 94, Calverton, MD).