CZO Network water budget data products

The US Critical Zone Observatories (CZOs) were created to advance understanding of the thin layer of the earth’s surface extending from unweathered bedrock to the top of the vegetation canopy. As part of this mission, each of the U.S CZOs is collecting and/or utilizing data for quantifying fluxes of water into and through the critical zone. This data resource collates common hydrological data from each of the U.S. CZOs, as a way of facilitating network-scale insight into the storage and transmission of water in the critical zone. Specifically, the data resource contains two “Levels” of data products. Level 1 data products are re-formatted versions of already existing data sets, such that variable units and the row-column orientation of each data set have been made standard to facilitate rapid utilization. Level 2 data products include basin-average estimates of precipitation, runoff, potential evapotranspiration, and transpiration which have been derived from Level 1 products. Specific methods for generating Level 2 data are outlined in the meta data, and detailed in a forthcoming publication by Wlostowski et al. (expected 2019).