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

Abstract

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).

Rainfall interception by urban trees: Event characteristics and tree morphological traits

“…The defined degree of surface sealing refers to the relative proportion of the CPA that is fully paved and impermeable. The specific sealing degree of various surface types within the CPA were obtained from Schaffitel et al (2020). For each surface type, the specific sealing degree was used for calculating weighted averages of total impermeable area of the CPA of each tree per study site (Table 1).…”

Exploring potential trade-offs in outdoor water use reductions and urban tree ecosystem services during an extreme drought in Southern California

“…Future work could utilize data from local urban street trees to explore how soil management and site selection might alter the predicted relationships among irrigation, climate and productivity. Measurements of infiltration capacity of urban soils that could also inform parameterization of these future modeling studies (Yang and Zhang, 2011;Phillips et al, 2019;Schaffitel et al, 2020).…”

Integrated monitoring and modeling to disentangle the complex spatio-temporal dynamics of urbanized streams under drought stress

“…These provide a fuller, more nuanced approach to understanding hydrological function, by integrating diverse complementary field data on the water cycle beyond simply rainfall and runoff (Hutchins et al, 2017 ). These include hydroclimatic fluxes (Vulova et al, 2023 ), isotopic and water quality characteristics (Kuhlemann et al, 2020 ), soil moisture and groundwater processes (Duethmann et al, 2022 ; Schaffitel et al, 2020 ), and vegetation parameters (Bernard et al, 2022 ; Crampe et al, 2021 ); data which are either empirically derived or remotely sensed at various spatial and temporal scales. Such data can then drive exploratory, multi-calibrated modeling to develop hypotheses of hydrological functions (e.g., Birkel et al, 2014 ; Kuppel et al, 2018 ).…”