MONGOLIA SOIL MOISTURE DATA Plant Available Soil Moisture Gravimetric Observations and maps, 1964-93 Alan Robock Department of Environmental Sciences Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Jared Entin Hydrological Sciences Branch, NASA-GSFC Konstantin Vinnikov Department of Meteorology, University of Maryland A. Namkhai Environmental Consulting and Assessment Company, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia Ts. Adyasuren Ministry of Nature and the Environment, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia 1. DESCRIPTION OF THE DATA SET The Mongolian data set consists of 42 stations for the period 1964-93. Twenty-five sites have pasture vegetation and 17 have wheat. All the observations were taken using the gravimetric technique for each 10-cm layer down to a depth of 1 m, with the first layer divided into two 5-cm layers. The data are volumetric plant-available soil moisture (W). Soil moisture was observed three times a month, on the 7th, 17th and 27th of the month from April through the end of October, and is described in detail in Robock et al. (1999). The data were used by Entin et al. (1999) to study the scales of soil moisture variations. Observations at some stations began as early as 1964. A majority of them began observations during 1970. The current records we have extend to either 1991 or 1993, depending on the location. Time series data corresponding to each individual layer are available for downloading in both GrADS and ASCII formats. 2. DATA SET IN ASCII FORMAT The data is archived in the file soilm_mong.dat. The header lines in this file list the relavent metadata about the station. Data are written as year, month, date, and 11 layers. The data file contains data for the dates 7, 17, and 27 of each month from 1964 to 1993. Missing data are indicated by code -9.9. A list of the 42 stations with their station IDs is given in the file list_mong.txt. Wilting levels corresponding to each soil layer (except 0-5cm) and top 1 m of the soil are in the file wiltlev_mong.dat. The read_mong.f is the Fortran program to read the mongolian data. Its Fortran format to read data is followed: 21 format(4X,A12,4X,I5,3X,I4,1X,I4,2X,F5.2,3X,F6.2,3X,F6.1,2X,A7,3X,A25) 31 format(5X,21(x,f5.1)) 3. GrADS FILES GrADS control and data files consisting time series for 10 cm, 50 cm and 1 m depths for all the 42 stations can be also downloaded for visualization. The files are Mong*.ctl, where * is either 10, 50 or 100 corresponding to the three depths. The GrADS executable Mong.x can be used along with one of the station numbers listed as variables in the GrADS .ctl files to display time-series. Mongo.pasm.maps.ctl can be used to make spatial plots. These files can be downloaded through anonymous ftp as follows: ftp climate.envsci.rutgers.edu login as: anonymous password: your e-mail address cd pub/soil_moisture/MONGOLIA/Grads/ bin prompt mget * bye or directly from ftp://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pub/soil_moisture/MONGOLIA/Grads/ 4. REFERENCES Entin, Jared K., Alan Robock, Konstantin Y. Vinnikov, Steven E. Hollinger, Suxia Liu, and A. Namkhai, 1999: Temporal and spatial scales of observed soil moisture variations in the extratropics. Submitted to J. Geophys. Res. Robock, A., K.Y. Vinnikov, G. Srinivasan, J.K. Entin, and, A. Namkhai, 1999: Mongolian soil moisture variations, J.Climate, in preparation. 5. IF YOU HAVE ANY PROBLEMS OR QUESTIONS YOU CAN CONTACT US FOR ASSISTANCE: Dr. Konstantin Ya. Vinnikov OR Prof. Alan Robock Department of Meteorology Department of Environmental Sciences University of Maryland Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey College Park, Maryland 20742 USA New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901 USA Phone: (301) 405-5382 Phone: (732) 932-9478 Fax: (301) 314-9482 Fax: (732) 932-8644 E-mail: kostya@atmos.umd.edu E-mail: robock@envsci.rutgers.edu OR OR Dr. Jared Entin Dr. Mingquan Mu Hydrological Sciences Branch Department of Environmental Sciences NASA-GSFC, Building #33, Mail Code 974 Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Greenbelt MD 20771 New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901 USA Phone: (301)-614-5825 Phone: (732) 932-9735 Fax: (301)-614-5808 Fax: (732) 932-8644 E-mail: Jared.Entin@gsfc.nasa.gov E-mail: mu@envsci.rutgers.edu Prepared by Alan Robock (robock@envsci.rutgers.edu) and Mingquan Mu (mu@envsci.rutgers.edu) Last updated on April 27, 2001