Software Suite

The Land Information System (LIS) is a software framework for high performance terrestrial hydrology modeling and data assimilation developed with the goal of integrating satellite and ground-based observational data products and advanced modeling techniques to produce optimal fields of land surface states and fluxes.

The LIS development is led by the Hydrological Sciences Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Introducing the LIS Framework

Video Credit: NASA GSFC.

The software suite consists of three modeling components: (1) Land surface Data Toolkit (LDT), a formal environment that handles the data-related requirements of LIS including land surface parameter processing, geospatial transformations, consistency checks, data assimilation preprocessing, and forcing bias correction, (2) Land Information System (LIS), the modeling system that encapsulates physical models, data assimilation algorithms, optimization and uncertainty estimation algorithms, and high performance computing support, and (3) Land surface Verification Toolkit (LVT), a formal model verification and benchmarking environment that can be used for enabling rapid prototyping and evaluation of model simulations by comparing against a comprehensive suite of in-situ, remote sensing, and model and reanalysis data products.

Mission

LIS is a land surface hydrology digital twin environment and is used at NASA/GSFC, NOAA/NCEP, and 557th Weather Wing.
LIS allows customized land data assimilation systems to be built, assembled and reconfigured easily, using shared plugins and standard interfaces.
LIS enables the use of an ensemble of land surface models, including Noah, Noah-MP, CLM, VIC, CABLE, Sacramento/SNOW17, among others.
LIS provides a portable, extensible, and flexible infrastructure for testing and transitioning the latest Earth science research into operations with interagency partners.
LIS is the land component for several Earth system models (e.g., NU-WRF).
LIS is the software framework for the Land Data Assimilation System (LDAS) projects (GLDAS, NLDAS, NCA-LDAS, and FLDAS) developed within the Hydrological Sciences Laboratory at NASA Goddard. These instances of LIS are driven by long-term data records of surface meteorological fields specific to that LDAS. For more information on the different LDAS projects, please visit their website.