Soil properties dataset in the United States

The dataset consists of three raster GeoTIFF files describing the following soil properties in the US: available water capacity, field capacity, and soil porosity. The input data were obtained from the gridded National Soil Survey Geographic (gNATSGO) Database and the Gridded Soil Survey Geographic (gSSURGO) Database with Soil Data Development tools provided by the Natural Resources Conservation Service. The soil characteristics derived from the databases were Available Water Capacity (AWC), Water Content (one-third bar) (WC), and Bulk Density (one-third bar) (BD) aggregated as weighted average values in the upper 1 m of soil. AWC and WC layers were converted to mm/m to express respectively available water capacity and field capacity in 1 m of soil, and BD layer was used to produce soil porosity raster assuming that the average particle density of soils is equal to 2.65 g/cm3. For each soil property, soil maps with CONUS, Alaska, and Hawaii geographic coverages were derived from separate databases and combined into one file. To replace no data values within a raster, we used data values statistically derived from neighboring cell values. The final product is provided in a GeoTIFF format and therefore can be easily integrated into raster-based models requiring estimates of soil characteristics in the US.