Arctic Soil Moisture and Thaw Depth Field Measurements from ABoVE Campaign

Soil Moisture and Active Layer Thickness (SMALT) dataset contains 528,703 field observations of thaw depth and soil moisture across Alaska and Canada's Northwest Territories. Measurements were collected by multiple research teams primarily in late summer from 2005 to 2022, using ground-penetrating radar, mechanical probes, and in-situ loggers. This dataset supports NASA's Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) and is relevant for UAVSAR calibration.

Use Cases

• Calibrating UAVSAR and other remote sensing data using in-situ soil moisture and dielectric property measurements.
• Modeling permafrost thaw dynamics by analyzing active layer thickness (ALT) measurements across a 17-year period.
• Comparing measurement techniques by examining data collected via GPR (90.2% of ALT), mechanical probing, HydroSense probes, and in-situ loggers.
• Studying seasonal thaw patterns using observations concentrated in August and September near the end of the annual thaw season.
• Assessing spatial variability of soil properties across specific field sites in the Arctic-Boreal region.

Strengths

• Contains 528,703 total observations, including 223,230 active layer thickness and 179,154 volumetric water content measurements.
• Provides detailed methodology breakdowns, showing 90.2% of ALT measurements were made with ground-penetrating radar.
• Covers a long temporal range from 2005 to 2022, capturing multi-year trends in Arctic soil conditions.
• Represents a multi-platform dataset, indicating its importance and use across different scientific data repositories.

Limitations

• Column names are not provided by any source, limiting immediate understanding of the data structure.
• Sources conflict on the last update date, with one listing 2026-03-13 and another 2022-09 -28.
• The specific license terms under 'other-license-specified' are not detailed.

Provenance

Source

NASA Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) field campaign, referenced as Schaefer et al., 2021 and Clayton et al., 2021.

Collection Method

Field measurements collected by research teams using mechanical probing, ground-penetrating radar, HydroSense probes, in-situ loggers, and DualEM instruments.

Time Range

2005 to 2022

Freshness

2026-03-13 17:33:44.667494

Geography

Sites in Alaska, USA, and the Northwest Territories, Canada.