A distributed soil moisture, temperature and infiltrometer dataset for permeable pavements and green spaces

Abstract

Knowledge of water and energy fluxes is key for urban planning and design. Nevertheless, hydrological data from urban environments are sparse, and, as a result, many processes are still poorly understood and thus inadequately represented within models. We contribute to reducing this shortfall by providing a dataset that includes time series of soil moisture and soil temperature measured underneath 18 different permeable pavements (PPs) and 4 urban green spaces located within the city of Freiburg (Germany). Time series were recorded with a high temporal resolution of 10 min using a total of 65 individual soil moisture sensors and covering a measurement period of 2 years (November 2016–October 2018). The recorded time series contain valuable information on the soil hydrological behavior of PPs and demonstrate the effect of surface properties and surrounding urban structures on soil temperatures. In addition, we performed double-ring infiltration experiments, which in combination with the soil moisture measurements yielded soil hydrological parameters for the PPs, including porosity, field capacity and infiltration capacity. We present this unique dataset, which is a valuable source of information for studying urban water and energy cycles. We encourage its usage in various ways, e.g., for model calibration and validation purposes, study of thermal regimes of cities, and derivation of urban water and energy fluxes. The dataset is freely available from the FreiDok plus data repository at https://freidok.uni-freiburg.de/data/151573 and https://doi.org/10.6094/UNIFR/151573 (Schaffitel et al., 2019).