Open AccessU.S. Climate Reference Network Soil Moisture and Temperature Observations
Author(s) -
Jesse E. Bell,
Michael A. Palecki,
C. Bruce Baker,
William G. Collins,
Jay Lawrimore,
Ronald D. Leeper,
Mark Hall,
John Kochendorfer,
Tilden P. Meyers,
Tim Wilson,
Howard J. Diamond
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
journal of hydrometeorology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.733
H-Index - 123
eISSN - 1525-755X
pISSN - 1525-7541
DOI - 10.1175/jhm-d-12-0146.1
Subject(s) - environmental science , context (archaeology) , water content , instrumentation (computer programming) , meteorology , computer science , geography , engineering , geotechnical engineering , operating system , archaeology
The U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) is a network of climate-monitoring stations maintained and operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to provide climate-science-quality measurements of air temperature and precipitation. The stations in the network were designed to be extensible to other missions, and the National Integrated Drought Information System program determined that the USCRN could be augmented to provide observations that are more drought relevant. To increase the network’s capability of monitoring soil processes and drought, soil observations were added to USCRN instrumentation. In 2011, the USCRN team completed at each USCRN station in the conterminous United States the installation of triplicate-configuration soil moisture and soil temperature probes at five standards depths (5, 10, 20, 50, and 100 cm) as prescribed by the World Meteorological Organization; in addition, the project included the installation of a relative humidity sensor at each of the stations. Work is also under way to eventually install soil sensors at the expanding USCRN stations in Alaska. USCRN data are stewarded by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center, and instrument engineering and performance studies, installation, and maintenance are performed by the NOAA Atmospheric Turbulence and Diffusion Division. This article provides a technical description of the USCRN soil observations in the context of U.S. soil-climate–measurement efforts and discusses the advantage of the triple-redundancy approach applied by the USCRN.