Monthly fractional green vegetation cover associated with land cover classes of the conterminous USA

Abstract

The land cover classes developed under the coordination of the International Geosphere‐Biosphere Programme Data and Information System (IGBP‐DIS) have been analyzed for a study area that includes the Conterminous United States and portions of Mexico and Canada. The 1‐km resolution data have been analyzed to produce a gridded data set that includes within each 20‐km grid cell: 1) the three most dominant land cover classes, 2) the fractional area associated with each of the three dominant classes, and 3) the fractional area covered by water. Additionally, the monthly fraction of green vegetation cover (fgreen) associated with each of the three dominant land cover classes per grid cell was derived from a 5‐year climatology of 1‐km resolution NOAA‐AVHRR data. The variables derived in this study provide a potential improvement over the use of monthly fgreen linked to a single land cover class per model grid cell.