CTP_SMTMN

A dense monitoring network that consists of 56 stations is established on the central Tibetan Plateau to measure two state variables (soil moisture and temperature) at three spatial scales (1.0, 0.3, 0.1 degree) and four soil depths (0~5, 10, 20, and 40 cm). Elevations of these stations vary over 4470~4950 m. The experimental area is characterized by low biomass, high soil moisture dynamic range, and typical freeze-thaw cycle. As auxiliary parameters of this network, soil texture and soil organic carbon content are measured at each station to support further studies. All the sensors have been calibrated by taking account of the impact of soil texture and soil organic carbon content on the measurements. As the highest soil moisture network above sea level in the world, this network meets the requirement for evaluating a variety of soil moisture products and for soil moisture scaling analyses. Note that, a) some of the stations are shared by two or three sub-scale networks (indicated by the station names) and thus the number of station names is up to 69 in total; b) in order to ensure the continuous measurements of the near surface (0~5 cm) SM/TM, the original surface layer sensor (when get damaged) is usually replaced with another sensor at deeper depth during field maintenance. Therefore there may be offset in a time series before and after the replacing time point (shown in Table 1). Table 1. Sensor replacing/exchanging time points at specific stations. Station_Name 0-0.05 m 0.40 m M19 10/13/2012 L01 6/14/2012 6/14/2012 L07_M13 6/15/2012 6/15/2012 L35 10/15/2012 10/15/2012 M03 10/13/2012 10/13/2012 M07_S01 10/13/2012 10/13/2012