The International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project (ISLSCP) was established in 1983 under the United Nation's Environmental Programme to promote the use of satellite data for the global land surface data sets needed for climate studies.

In June of 1992, an interdisciplindary Earth Science workshop was convened in Columbia, Maryland, to assess recent progress in land-atmosphere research, specifically in the areas of models, satellite data algorithms, and field experiments. At the workshop, representatives of the land-atmosphere modeling community stated that they had a need for global data sets to prescribe boundary conditions, initialize state variables, and provide near-surface meteorological and radiative forcings for their models. The data sets collated for ISLSCP Initiative I represent a first attempt to meet this need.