High resolution soil moisture and soil temperature data during Hurricane Florence, 2018, over the Carolina region (U.S.)

We set the study domain over the U.S. east coast to cover the Carolinas and the regions that were affected by Hurricane Florence. Therefore, the selected domain covered the area between -86º to -75º longitude and 30º to 40º latitude. We should note that Hurricane Florence made landfall in the Carolinas on September 14, 2018, as a Category 1 storm.  Hurricane reports indicate that “Hurricane Florence made landfall near Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina at 7:15 AM EDT (1115 UTC) on September 14 with estimated maximum winds of 90 mph (150 km/h), and a minimum central pressure estimate of 958 millibars. Winds gusts topping 105 mph (169 km/h) were reported in the Outer Banks of North Carolina.” Rainfall from Florence, as per the initial reports, suggest possible new records for North Carolina (breaking the record set by Hurricane Floyd in 1999).

we used the latest development of the high-resolution land surface assimilation system (HRLDAS) that was retrieved from the Github repository (https://github.com/NCAR/hrldas-release). The model was coupled to the Noah land surface modeling system and used the multi-layer soil model, complex canopy resistance with the Penman method for calculating evapotranspiration, and frozen ground physics for the simulations.

 The atmospheric forcing including 2-meter air temperature, shortwave, and long-wave radiation, 2-meter wind speed, 2-meter specific humidity, and surface pressure data was obtained from the NCEP-DOE Reanalysis 2 (available from psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.ncep.reanalysis2.html). For the precipitation, we used the high-resolution GCIP/EOP surface precipitation NCEP/EMC gridded data (Stage IV) with 4 km of grid spacing. All the forcing data have been retrieved at an hourly frequency from 2016 to 2019. The model was configured with the initial soil moisture and soil temperature conditions at 4 depths (0-10, 10-40, 40-100, 100-200 cm), retrieved from the NCEP data. Other initialization fields including skin temperature and water equivalent snow depth were retrieved from NCEP. The NCEP reanalysis data, however, does not provide “plant canopy surface water” data which is required as an initialization field. This data was retrieved from the NLDAS dataset. The first two years of the model run (2016 and 2017) were considered as the spin-up, and the outcome during 2018 was used for further analysis and public release.