Global Soil Saturated Hydraulic Conductivity Map at 1 km Resolution

A global map of soil saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ksat) at 1 km spatial resolution. It was developed by ETH Zurich researchers using a machine learning framework that integrates remotely sensed terrain, climate, vegetation, and soil covariates with a large dataset of Ksat measurements. The dataset consists of four GeoTIFF files representing different soil depths and provides log-transformed Ksat values in cm/day.

Use Cases

• Calibrate hydrological models based on global soil permeability estimates.
• Assess water infiltration and runoff potential for climate impact studies based on terrain and climate covariates.
• Inform agricultural water management and irrigation planning based on soil hydraulic properties.
• Validate other global soil property datasets using the machine learning-derived estimates.

Strengths

• Provides data at four distinct soil depths (0, 30, 60, and 100 cm).
• Uses a large dataset of Ksat measurements integrated with multiple remote sensing data sources.
• Data is provided in a standardized, log-transformed unit (log10 Ksat in cm/day).

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

ETH Zurich

Collection Method

Generated using a Covariate-based Geo Transfer Functions (CoGTF) framework with Random Forest machine learning.

Geography

Global