MONGOLIA SOIL MOISTURE DATA Plant Available Soil Moisture Gravimetric Observations and maps, 1964-98 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, with updates of several stations through 1998. 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. The data set is described in Robock et al. (2000). The data were used by Entin et al. (2000) 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 1991, 1993 or 1998, depending on the location. Time series data corresponding to each individual layer are available for downloading in both GrADS and ASCII formats. Click here for a location map of the 42 stations Click here for a sample time series plot Click here for a sample spatial plot 2. DATA SET IN ASCII FORMAT These data are archived in the file soilm_mong.dat. Data are written as year, month, date, and 11 layer W with the FORTRAN format(4X,A12,4X,I5,3X,I4,1X,I4,2X,F5.2,3X,F6.2,3X,F6.1,2X,A7,3X,A25) format(5X,21(x,f5.1)) The 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 FORTRAN program to read these data is in the file read_mong.f. Updated data for 12 stations are available at updatedsm_mong.dat. To produce plant-available soil moisture, wilting levels were subtracted from total soil moisture. By examining the plant-available data, it seemed to us that the wrong wilting level may have been used, as even during dry periods the plant-available soil moisture was still quite high. Therefore, we have subtracted the apparent excess from the data for some of our analyses. We provide this file here as wiltlev_corrections_mong.dat. The 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/Data/ bin prompt mget * bye or directly from ftp://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pub/soil_moisture/MONGOLIA/Data/ 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. Namkai, 2000: Temporal and spatial scales of observed soil moisture variations in the extratropics. J. Geophys. Res., 105, 11,865-11,877. ABSTRACT Robock, Alan, Konstantin Y. Vinnikov, Govindarajalu Srinivasan, Jared K. Entin, Steven E. Hollinger, Nina A. Speranskaya, Suxia Liu, and A. Namkhai, 2000: The Global Soil Moisture Data Bank. Bull. Amer. Meteorol. Soc., 81, 1281-1299. ABSTRACT 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 Dr. Jared Entin OR Dr. Mingquan Mu Hydrological Sciences Branch Department of Environmental Sciences NASA-GSFC, Building#33 Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Greenbelt, MD 20771 USA 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 May 9, 2001