TRACER: Soil Water Content and Meteorological Data for Four Stations in Houston, Texas

Four ground stations in Harris County, Texas, collected mean hourly soil water content and meteorological data to support the 2022 TRACER field campaign. The Bureau of Economic Geology at UT Austin installed the stations, producing flagged data files for soil measurements at four depths and meteorological variables. All data have undergone QA/QC procedures described by referenced publications.

Use Cases

• Validate remote sensing soil moisture estimates based on ground-truth measurements at 5, 10, 20, and 50 cm depths.
• Analyze land-atmosphere coupling for convection modeling based on co-located soil moisture, precipitation, air temperature, and solar radiation data.
• Calibrate or evaluate hydrological or land surface models based on the hourly time-series data from the four installed stations.

Strengths

• Data underwent QA/QC procedures following established methods from Caldwell et al. (2019), Dorigo et al. (2013), and EPA (2008).
• Provides co-located, mean hourly measurements of both soil (volumetric water content, temperature) and meteorological (precipitation, air temperature, humidity, wind, solar radiation) variables.
• Supports a specific, large-scale field campaign (the 2022 TRACER experiment) funded by the DOE ARM user facility.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale ML tasks.
• The temporal coverage is implied but not explicitly stated; the exact date range of the 'period of performance' is not provided.

Provenance

Source

Bureau of Economic Geology at UT Austin, supporting the DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility.

Collection Method

In-situ measurements from four ground stations installed in the study area.

Time Range

Supports the 2022 TRACER field campaign; specific date range not provided.

Freshness

Last updated 2024-03-18 06:56:26; freshness should be verified

Geography

Harris County, Texas, USA (Houston area).