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New 5-minute Soil Data and 30-second Landuse Data in TERRAIN

In V3.5, the soil category, and vegetation data are updated.

The soil category data are updated with the United Nation/FAO 5-minute global dataset. We have combined the 5-minute data with the STATSGO 30-second CONUS data to create soil category data at all six resolutions (60, 30, 10, 5 and 2 minutes and 30 seconds). In addition, two layers of soil category data are provided: one for top soil layer in 0 - 30 cm layer, and one for bottome soil layer in 30 - 70 cm layer.

Click here to see a map of top soil data over Continental US produced on a 15 km grid using 5-minute input data.

Click here to see a map of bottom soil data over Continental US produced on a 15 km grid using 5-minute input data.

Over the Antarctic, soil type is assumed to be glacier (the FAO dataset didn't provide data over Antarctic) which is the same as we had previously.

Over Hawaii, the 5-minute data show improvement over what was available before.

The new landuse data are updated with the Version 2 USGS land-cover data (see http://edcdaac.usgs.gov/glcc/glcc.html). There are some changes over parts of the world in this newer dataset as compared to what we had before.

Click here to see a map of updated landuse over the Continental US produced on a 15 km grid using 5-minute input data.

Over Hawaii, the new landuse data provided urban category but none others. The rest of the islands are filled with dominent landuse category over the similar latitudes, which turns out to be mixed forest (category 15 in USGS dataset). The previous landuse over the islands was savanna (category 8).