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 researchers at ETH Zurich using a machine learning framework that integrates terrain, climate, vegetation, and soil covariates. The dataset includes four GeoTIFF files representing different soil depths and is based on a published 2020 study.

Use Cases

• Modeling subsurface water flow and infiltration based on global Ksat estimates.
• Assessing soil drainage capacity for agricultural planning using terrain and climate covariates.
• Parameterizing land surface models for climate studies with spatially continuous soil property data.
• Studying the impact of vegetation and climate on soil hydraulic properties across different regions.

Strengths

• Provides global coverage at 1 km resolution.
• Includes data for four distinct soil depths (0, 30, 60, and 100 cm).
• Uses a published machine learning framework (CoGTF) integrating multiple remote sensing data sources.
• Associated training data and source code are publicly available.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• 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 GeoTransfer Functions (CoGTF) framework with Random Forest, trained on a global Ksat measurement dataset.

Geography

Global