The Global Soil Dataset for Earth System ModelingIntroduction | Data citation | Data download IntroductionWe developed a comprehensive, gridded Global Soil Dataset for use in Earth System Models (GSDE) and other applications as well. GSDE provides soil information including soil particle-size distribution, organic carbon, and nutrients, etc. and quality control information in terms of confidence level. GSDE is based on the Soil Map of the World and various regional and national soil databases, including soil attribute data and soil maps. We used a standardized data structure and data processing procedures to harmonize the data collected from various sources. We then used a soil type linkage method (i.e. taxotransfer rules) and the polygon linkage method to derive the spatial distribution of soil properties. To aggregate the attributes of different compositions of a mapping unit, we used three mapping approaches: area-weighting method, the dominant soil type method and the dominant binned soil attribute method. In the released gridded dataset, we used the area-weighting method as it will meet the demands of most applications. The dataset can be also aggregate to a lower resolution. The resolution is 30 arc-seconds (about 1 km at the equator). The vertical variation of soil property was captured by eight layers to the depth of 2.3 m (i.e. 0- 0.045, 0.045- 0.091, 0.091- 0.166, 0.166- 0.289, 0.289- 0.493, 0.493- 0.829, 0.829- 1.383 and 1.383- 2.296 m). The documentation of the dataset can be downloaded here, including readme file and the data citation paper (with its auxiliary material). Data citationShangguan, W., Dai, Y., Duan, Q., Liu, B. and Yuan, H., 2014. A Global Soil Data Set for Earth System Modeling. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 6: 249-263 . Data downloadThe dataset in binary and NetCDF format can be downloaded in the following table. There are for 11 types of soil general information for soil profiles and 34 soil properties for 8 depths. We provided two versions with different resolution, i.e., 30 seconds (~1km) and 5 minutes (~10km). The soil general information of 30 seconds version is as follows:
5 minutes version: general.zip The 34 soil properties had 8 binary files for each of them. Each binary file contains the information of 1 layer. The name of each file end with a number to indicate the layer order from the top to the bottom. To get the correct value, you should multiply the values from the file with the scale factor.For NetCDF format, one file is for the top four layers, the other is for the bottom 4 layers. 30 seconds version is as follows:
5 minutes version is as follows (the names of the file indicate the No. in the above table): 1-9.zip, 10-18.zip, 19-26.zip, 27-34.zip Soil organic carbon density: SOCD5min.zip |
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