A Conterminous United States Multilayer Soil Characteristics Dataset for Regional Climate and Hydrology Modeling

Abstract

Soil information is now widely required by many climate and hydrology models and soil?vegetation?atmosphere transfer schemes. This paper describes the development of a multilayer soil characteristics dataset for the conterminous United States (CONUS-SOIL) that specifically addresses the need for soil physical and hydraulic property information over large areas. The State Soil Geographic Database (STATSGO) developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture?Natural Resources Conservation Service served as the starting point for CONUS-SOIL. Geographic information system and Perl computer programming language tools were used to create map coverages of soil properties including soil texture and rock fragment classes, depth-to-bedrock, bulk density, porosity, rock fragment volume, particle-size (sand, silt, and clay) fractions, available water capacity, and hydrologic soil group. Interpolation procedures for the continuous and categorical variables describing these soil properties were developed and applied to the original STATSGO data. In addition to any interpolation errors, the CONUS-SOIL dataset reflects the limitations of the procedures used to generate detailed county-level soil survey data to the STATSGO map units. CONUS-SOIL is available in several formats and may be accessed via the World Wide Web.