Processed Data for Snow cover and elevation impacts on seasonal soil temperature biases in modern reanalysis systems

This repository contains three data files to accompany Herrington and Fletcher (submitted to JGR: Atmospheres) - Snow cover and elevation impacts on seasonal soil temperature biases in modern reanalysis systems. These include the processed data, for which in-situ and product data have been collocated, for all variables of interest. The accompanying code has been archived in a GitHub Repository which includes the Python scripts used to calculate metrics and to create the figures, and will be made available at the time of publication on Zenodo. The processed_collocated_data.csv includes all collocated monthly averaged data for variables of interest from both SNOTEL (US Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service, 2025), as well as each of the products: ERA5 (Hersbach et al., 2020), ERA5-Land (Muñoz-Sabater et al., 2021), FLDAS (McNally et al., 2017), and MERRA2 (Gelaro et al., 2017). The daily_snow_data.csv includes all collocated daily averaged snow variables from both SNOTEL, as well as each of the products (ERA5, ERA5-Land, FLDAS, and MERRA2) used to calculate snow-on/snow-off dates, as well as the annual maximum SWE metrics. USGS_DEM_Western_US.tif is a subset of the USGS 1/3 arc-second DEM over the western United States (United States Geological Survey, 2021) References: Hersbach, H., Bell, B., Berrisford, P., Hirahara, S., Horányi, A., Muñoz‐Sabater, J., Nicolas, J., Peubey, C., Radu, R., Schepers, D., Simmons, A., Soci, C., Abdalla, S., Abellan, X., Balsamo, G., Bechtold, P., Biavati, G., Bidlot, J., Bonavita, M., … Thépaut, J. (2020). The ERA5 global reanalysis. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 146(730), 1999–2049. https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.3803 Gelaro, R., McCarty, W., Suárez, M. J., Todling, R., Molod, A., Takacs, L., Randles, C. A., Darmenov, A., Bosilovich, M. G., Reichle, R., Wargan, K., Coy, L., Cullather, R., Draper, C., Akella, S., Buchard, V., Conaty, A., da Silva, A. M., Gu, W., … Zhao, B. (2017). The Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2). Journal of Climate, 30(14), 5419–5454. https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-16-0758.1 McNally, A., Arsenault, K., Kumar, S., Shukla, S., Peterson, P., Wang, S., Funk, C., Peters-Lidard, C. D., & Verdin, J. P. (2017). A land data assimilation system for sub-Saharan Africa food and water security applications. Scientific Data, 4(1), 170012. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2017.12 Muñoz-Sabater, J., Dutra, E., Agustí-Panareda, A., Albergel, C., Arduini, G., Balsamo, G., Boussetta, S., Choulga, M., Harrigan, S., Hersbach, H., Martens, B., Miralles, D. G., Piles, M., Rodríguez-Fernández, N. J., Zsoter, E., Buontempo, C., & Thépaut, J.-N. (2021). ERA5-Land: A state-of-the-art global reanalysis dataset for land applications. Earth System Science Data, 13(9), 4349–4383. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-4349-2021 United States Geological Survey. (2021). United States Geological Survey 3D Elevation Program 1/3 arc-second Digital Elevation Model [Data set]. OpenTopography. https://doi.org/10.5069/G98K778D US Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service. (2025). Snow telemetry data (SNOTEL) [Dataset] [Data set]. https://wcc.sc.egov.usda.gov/reportGenerator/