TxSON: Hourly Soil Moisture and Temperature in Texas Hill Country, 2015-2018

The Texas Soil Observation Network (TxSON) provides a four-year dataset of hourly soil moisture and temperature from 40 monitoring stations in a 1300 km2 area near Fredericksburg, Texas. Data includes volumetric water content and temperature measured at four depths, plus precipitation and meteorological variables. The dataset was created by Tara Bongiovanni and last updated in March 2024.

Use Cases

• Modeling soil moisture dynamics based on hourly measurements at multiple depths.
• Analyzing the relationship between precipitation and soil water content based on co-located meteorological data.
• Studying microclimate variations in rangelands based on air temperature, humidity, and solar radiation measurements.
• Validating remote sensing or hydrological models based on the spatially nested station design within the Equal-Area Scalable Earth Grid.

Strengths

• Data spans four years from 2015, providing a multi-year time series.
• 40 monitoring stations are nested at three spatial scales (3, 9, and 36 km) within a 1300 km2 area.
• Measurements include soil moisture and temperature at 5, 10, 20, and 50 cm depths, plus full meteorological variables at six stations.

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.

Provenance

Source

Texas Data Repository Harvested Dataverse

Collection Method

Data collected from 40 soil moisture monitoring stations and six meteorological stations.

Time Range

2015 to 2018 (four-year dataset)

Freshness

Last updated 2024-03-18 08:04:44; freshness should be verified.

Geography

1300 km2 area near Fredericksburg, Texas, within the middle reaches of the Colorado River, representing the Texas Hill Country.