For better prediction of the future climate at Asian drylands by using climate models, a community of Asian scientists, including young scientists, was formed to intercompare numerous land surface process models. These models are sub-modules of climate models to reproduce water, energy and vegetation processes at land surface, and are used independently, i.e. “offline,” from climate models in the present study. The Asian Dryland Model Intercomparison Project (ADMIP) is an international project driven by this community. The data needed to drive the models at the target sites were collected and archived: one of the finest data sets for Asian drylands was constructed. Then, these data were used to drive a number of state-of-the-art numerical models of land surface processes. The outputs generated were also archived, and they were subject to mutual comparison. This way of comparison is called model intercomparison, which sheds light on differences in the reproducibility of land surface processes caused by different coding between the models. This gave an insight into the current status of modelling skills of land surface processes at Asian drylands.