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ABoVE: Soil Moisture and Active Layer Thickness in Alaska, USA and Canada, 2005-2022

Published by ORNL_DAAC | National Aeronautics and Space Administration | Metadata Last Checked: October 23, 2025 | Last Modified: 2025-09-10
This dataset provides soil thaw depth and moisture measurements and dielectric properties measured by different research teams at sites in Alaska, U.S., and the Northwest Territories, Canada. There are multiple observations per site and 528,703 total observations. The dataset includes 223,230 observations of active layer thickness measured by mechanical probing (9.8%) or ground penetrating radar (GPR) (90.2%). Approximately 179,154 volumetric water content (VWC) measurements were collected using GPR (2.0%), HydroSense I and II probes (8.8%), in situ loggers (89.2%), and DualEM (<1.0%). Metadata includes the location, time, geospatial coordinates, sampling technique, measurement teams, and field team contact information. Measurements were typically collected in August and September near the end of the thaw season and cover the period from 2005 to 2022. This dataset, referred to as field measurements of Soil Moisture and Active layer Thickness (SMALT) (Schaefer et al., 2021), was developed for work in Clayton et al. (2021). It has been expanded in Version 2 to comprise a comprehensive dataset of NASA Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) field campaign measurements of soil moisture and active layer thickness, including logger data of relevance to Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) acquisitions. The data are provided in comma separated values (CSV) format.

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