The Global Soil Wetness Project uses several different land surface schemes to produce global gridded soil moisture calculations for 1987-1988 forced with observed meteorology and radiation. The actual observations that are available for evaluating these calculations are reviewed and compared to the calculations. In general, the interannual variations of soil moisture by the models are reasonably simulated, while the actual values of soil moisture are not. Much more work is still needed before models can produce reliable global soil wetness "data."