The characteristics of eight global soil wetness products, three produced by land surface model calculations, three from coupled land - atmosphere model reanalyses, and two from microwave remote sensing estimates, have been examined. The goal of this study is to determine whether there exists an optimal dataset for the initialization of the land surface component of global weather and climate forecast models. Their abilities to simulate the phasing of the annual cycle and to accurately represent interannual variability in soil wetness by comparing to available in situ measurements are validated. Because soil wetness climatologies vary greatly among land surface models, and models have different operating ranges for soil wetness (i.e., very different mean values, variances, and hydrologically critical thresholds such as the point where evaporation occurs at the potential rate or where surface runoff begins), one cannot simply take the soil wetness field from one product and apply it to an arbitrary land surface scheme (LSS) as an initial condition without experiencing some sort of initialization shock. A means of renormalizing soil wetness is proposed based on the local statistical properties of this field in the source and target models, to allow a large number of climate models to apply the same initialization in multimodel studies or intercomparisons. As a test of feasibility, renormalization among the model-derived products is applied to see how it alters the character of the soil wetness climatologies.
