Abstract:The valuable role played by satellite observations in addressing global environmental changes has not been fully realized. The global land products of long time series, high spatial and temporal resolution, and high quality and accuracy are especially needed. Although China has launched a series of earth observation satellites, no high-level global land products have been produced previously. A project entitled "Research and Development of the System for Global Land Surface Parameter Product Set and Product Generation" was funded by the 863 program from 2009 to 2012 and participated by over 20 universities and research institutes, with the goal of producing five Global LAnd Surface Satellite (GLASS) products using multiple global satellite data sources. The inversion methods for generating these GLASS products have been published in the major remote sensing journals. A high-performance computer based production system at Beijing Normal University has been developed to produce these five GLASS products, which include Leaf Area Index (LAI), shortwave broadband albedo, longwave broadband emissivity, incident short radiation, and Photosynthetically Active Radiation (PAR). The first three products cover the years 1981-2012 (LAI) and 1981-2010 (albedo and emissivity) at 1-5 km and 8 day resolutions, and the last two radiation products span the period 2008-2010 at 5 km and 3 h resolutions. These products have been evaluated and validated, and the preliminary results indicate that they are of higher quality and accuracy than existing products. In particular, the first three products have much longer time series and are, therefore, highly suitable for various environmental studies. Studies have been also conducted to demonstrate the values of these GLASS products in land surface simulations through data assimilation and global environmental changes. These five GLASS products are now available to worldwide users and are being distributed by the Center for Global Change Data Processing and Analysis, Beijing Normal University at http://glass-product.bnu.edu.cn/ and the University of Maryland Global Land Cover Facility at http://glcf.umd.edu/. This paper systematically documents the achievements of this 863 project from data collection and management, algorithm development, system development, product generation, validation, distribution, and application demonstrations.