A Conterminous United States Multilayer Soil Characteristics Dataset for Regional Climate and Hydrology Modeling

Soil information is now widely required by many climate and hydrology models and soil-vegetation-atmosphere transfer schemes. This pa- per describes the development of a multilayer soil characteristics dataset for the conterminous United States (CONUS-SOIL) that specifically addresses the need for soil physical and hydraulic property information over large areas. The State Soil Geographic Database (STATSGO) developed by the U.S. De- partment of Agriculture-Natural Resources Conservation Service served as the starting point for CONUS-SOIL. Geographic information system and Perl computer programming language tools were used to create map coverages of soil properties including soil texture and rock fragment classes, depth-to-bed- rock, bulk density, porosity, rock fragment volume, particle-size (sand, silt, and clay) fractions, available water capacity, and hydrologic soil group. In- terpolation procedures for the continuous and categorical variables describing these soil properties were developed and applied to the original STATSGO data. In addition to any interpolation errors, the CONUS-SOIL dataset reflects the limitations of the procedures used to generate detailed county-level soil