From NEON field sites to data portal: a community resource for surface-atmosphere research

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a multi-decadal and continental-scale observatory, with sites across the Unites States. Entering its operational phase in 2018, NEON data products, software, and services become readily and freely available to facilitate research on the impacts of climate change, land use change and invasive species.
An important component of NEON are its 47 tower sites, where eddy-covariance (EC) sensors are operated to determine the surface-atmosphere exchange of momentum, heat, water and CO2. EC tower networks such as AmeriFlux, ICOS and NEON are vital for providing the distributed observations to address interactions at the soil-vegetation-atmosphere interface. NEON represents the largest single-provider EC network globally, with standardized observations and data processing designed specifically for inter- and intra-site comparability and analysis of feedbacks across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Furthermore, EC is closely integrated with soil, meteorology, atmospheric chemistry, isotope, phenology and rich contextual observations such as airborne remote sensing and in-situ sampling bouts.
Here, we present an overview of NEON’s observational design, field operation, and data processing that yield community resources for the study of surface-atmosphere interactions. Near-real-time data products become available from the NEON Data Portal, and EC and meteorological data are ingested in AmeriFlux and FLUXNET globally harmonized data releases. Open-source and open-development software for reproducible, extensible and portable data analysis includes the eddy4R family of R-packages underlying the EC data product generation.
These resources strive to integrate with existing infrastructures and networks, to suggest novel systemic solutions, and to synergize ongoing research efforts across science communities.
This dataset contains all study data in the form of a multivolume .zip archive. The .zip.001, .zip.002 etc. files can be downloaded individually, and need to be in the same folder for extraction with software such as 7-zip. For extraction the software should be pointed only to the .zip.001 volume, and the contents of all subsequent volumes are detected and extracted automatically. Alternatively, it is possible to “select all” during the download operation. However, the resulting .zip container is quite large (~25 GB) and thus more prone to network interruptions. Also, a “headers error” can be expected during initial extraction of the container, and a subsequent extraction of the multivolume archive is still necessary.