Soil climate stations

Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research, the University of Waikato, and the United States Department of Agriculture established a network of soil-climate monitoring stations in the McMurdo Sound region, Antarctica with the support of Antarctica New Zealand. Started in 1999, it is the largest long-running continuous soil-permafrost temperature monitoring data set for the seventh continent. This page provides some background to the stations, and links for data access.

History and setup of the climate research stations

The 9 climate stations were established starting in 1999 through to 2011. Four of the stations are in the Dry Valleys and four are located along the coast. The ninth station is located on Mt. Fleming near the polar plateau.

J Kimble & R Paetzold installing monitoring equipment at the Bull Pass soil climate station, 1999.

Each climate station measures atmospheric parameters (air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, and solar radiation) and soil parameters (soil moisture and temperature) that extend from the active layer (seasonally thawed layer) into the permafrost. Recorded measurements are made on an hourly basis. At each climate station the soils have been sampled and characterized at USDA’s Kellogg Soil Survey Laboratory.

There are also two borehole stations, one at at Bull Pass and one at Marble Point which measure ground temperature and are used to study permafrost temperatures and active-layer thermal regimes to a depth of 30 m.  A detailed account of the Bore-hole set-up is included in Adlam et al., 2009.

R Paetzold at the Marble Point soil climate monitoring site, 1999.

Description of data

Each year data from the soil climate stations is manually downloaded and maintenance is undertaken to ensure the longevity of both the physical structures and data. Marwan Katurji from Canterbury Uni is managing the downloads and distribution of the data.

For each of the 11 locations, the archived raw data, collated and illustrated data (MS Excel), and metadata (site photos, soil descriptions, etc.) are available for free download. The following archives are available:

·      Until 2022: Individual .zip files named with site location that contain data for each site up to December 2022;

·      From 2023: Complete data download across all sites; note that these data have not yet been split and merged with other data.

Soil Climate Station Locations

Data access

The data can be downloaded from MWLR Datastore:

https://datastore.landcareresearch.co.nz/dataset/soil-climate-research-station-data

The metadata record in the Antarctica New Zealand Metadata Catalogue records are here.

Further reading

A comprehensive summary is provided by:

Seybold, C. A.,Harms, D. S., Balks, M., Aislabie, J., Paetzold, R. F., Kimble, J., Sletten, R. (2009). Soil Climate Monitoring Project in the Ross Island Region of Antarctica. Soil Survey Horizons, 50(2), 52-57. doi:10.2136/sh2009.2.0052 or access from here.