Global Soil Available Water Capacity in mm for Five Depth Layers, 250m Resolution

Available Water Capacity (AWC) in millimeters derived for five standard soil depth layers (0-10, 10-30, 30-60, 60-100, and 100-200 cm) at a 250-meter spatial resolution. The data was created by Tomislav Hengl using the Water Retention Difference method and represents a long-term average for the period 1950 to 2017. Antarctica is not included in the spatial coverage.

Use Cases

• Modeling crop water stress and irrigation needs based on soil water retention capacity.
• Assessing regional water storage potential for hydrological and climate models.
• Informing land management and agricultural planning using spatially explicit soil property data.
• Estimating plant-available water across landscapes for ecological and drought resilience studies.

Strengths

• Provides data for five distinct soil depth layers, enabling vertical profile analysis.
• Offers a high spatial resolution of 250 meters for detailed regional mapping.
• Covers a long-term reference period from 1950 to 2017, representing a climatic average.

Limitations

• The estimates ignore depth to bedrock, likely overestimating total available capacity by 10-15%.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and file size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Tomislav Hengl

Collection Method

Derived by calculating Water Retention Difference (field capacity minus wilting point) and summing for standard layers.

Time Range

1950-2017

Freshness

Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Geography

Global, excluding Antarctica.