Monthly Soil Temperature and Moisture Summaries from Nine Chinese Sites

Soil temperature and soil moisture data collected from nine monitoring stations across China. The dataset provides monthly summaries with temporal coverage varying by station, spanning from June 1998 to May 2002. It was compiled and is provided by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

Use Cases

• Analyzing seasonal and interannual variability in soil temperature across multiple Chinese sites.
• Correlating soil moisture measurements with regional climate patterns or precipitation events.
• Validating land surface models or remote sensing soil moisture products using in-situ station data.
• Studying soil freeze-thaw cycles and their relation to atmospheric conditions.

Strengths

• Data is sourced from nine distinct in-situ monitoring stations, providing ground-truth measurements.
• Covers a multi-year time series from 1998 to 2002, allowing for temporal trend analysis.
• Available in both compiled (Excel) and station-specific (tab-delimited ASCII) formats for flexibility.

Limitations

• Specific row counts, column names, and dataset size are not documented on any platform.
• Conflicting metadata exists: one source lists a last update date of 2026-03-12, while another lists 2002-05 -31, indicating potential provenance or versioning issues.

Provenance

Source

National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC); full dataset available from Ron Paetzold, USDA.

Collection Method

In-situ measurements collected at nine monitoring stations.

Time Range

June 1998 to May 2002

Freshness

2026-03 12 23:34:40.584142

Geography

Nine sites in China