Soil moisture is a key parameter for understanding fluxes of moisture and energy between the land and atmosphere. Around the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility’s Southern Great Plains (SGP) atmospheric observatory, variations in soil moisture are expected to affect land-atmosphere interactions. In support of continuing soil moisture research applications on a mesoscale level at the SGP, the Oklahoma Mesonet Soil Moisture (OKMSOIL) value-added product (VAP) is now in production.
OKMSOIL was derived from the current 30-minute-averaged products from the Oklahoma Mesonet (OKM), a network of monitoring stations developed as a joint project between Oklahoma State University and the University of Oklahoma. Since its inception in the early 1990s, OKM has deployed and maintained more than 100 surface meteorology and soil characterization stations across Oklahoma. OKM’s dense instrumentation network provides a good representation of land surface/subsurface conditions across the SGP Central Facility and surrounding regions.
Previously an evaluation VAP, OKMSOIL provides 30-minute-averaged products for the soil matric potential (capillary force needed for the soil matrix to hold water), volumetric water content (total percent of water per volume of soil), and fractional water index (relative measure of soil wetness) at all OKM surface stations, including those near the SGP Central Facility.
OKMSOIL supplements the information provided by the current OKM data sets and calculates the volumetric water content for stations across this network. These estimates are based on previous OKM studies (e.g., Illston et al. 2008) and an existing soil hydraulic parameter database (Meso-Soil Database).
Scientists can use the OKMSOIL data sets now. More than two decades of production data (1998‒2019) are available. For questions, please contact the associated translator, Scott Giangrande.
More information about OKMSOIL can be found on the VAP web page. To access these data, please log in to the ARM Data Center. (Go here to create an account to download the data.)
To cite the OKMSOIL data, please use doi:10.5439/1432043.
Reference: Illston BG, JB Basara, DK Fisher, R Elliott, CA Fiebrich, KC Crawford, K Humes, and E Hunt. 2008. “Mesoscale Monitoring of Soil Moisture across a Statewide Network.” Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, 25, 167‒182, 10.1175/2007JTECHA993.1.
# # #ARM is a DOE Office of Science user facility operated by nine DOE national laboratories.