| Abstract: | As global warming continues to intensify, the problems of climate anomalies and
deterioration of the water environment in East Asia are becoming increasingly prominent. In order to
assist decision-making to tackle these problems, it is necessary to conduct in-depth research on the
water environment and water resources through applying various hydrological and environmental
models. To this end, the China Meteorological Assimilation Driving Datasets for the Soil and
Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model (CMADS) has been applied to East Asian regions where
environmental issues are obvious, but the stations for monitoring meteorological variables are not
uniformly distributed. The dataset contains all of the meteorological variables for SWAT, such as
temperature, air pressure, humidity, wind, precipitation, and radiation. In addition, it includes a
range of variables relevant to the Earth’s surface processes, such as soil temperature, soil moisture,
and snowfall. Although the dataset is used mainly to drive the SWAT model, a large number of
users worldwide for different models have employed CMADS and it is expected that users will not
continue to limit the application of CMADS data to the SWAT model only. We believe that CMADS
can assist all the users involved in the meteorological field in all aspects. In this paper, we introduce
the research and development background, user group distribution, application area, application
direction, and future development of CMADS. All of the articles published in this special issue will
be mentioned in the contributions section of this article. |