ABoVE: Soil Moisture and Active Layer Thickness in Alaska, USA and Canada, 2005-2024

This dataset provides soil thaw depth and moisture measurements and dielectric properties measured by different research teams at sites in Alaska, U.S., and the Northwest Territories, Canada. There are multiple observations per site and 529,862 total observations. The dataset includes 224,200 observations of active layer thickness measured by mechanical probing (9.8%) or ground penetrating radar (GPR) (90.2%). Approximately 180,310 volumetric water content (VWC) measurements were collected using GPR (2.0%), HydroSense I and II probes (8.8%), in situ loggers (89.2%), and DualEM (<1.0%). Metadata includes the location, time, geospatial coordinates, sampling technique, measurement teams, and field team contact information. Measurements were typically collected in August and September near the end of the thaw season and cover the period from 2005 to 2024. This dataset, referred to as field measurements of Soil Moisture and Active layer Thickness (SMALT) (Schaefer et al., 2021), was developed for work in Clayton et al. (2021). It has been expanded in Version 2 to comprise a comprehensive dataset of NASA Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) field campaign measurements of soil moisture and active layer thickness, including logger data of relevance to Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) acquisitions. The data are provided in comma separated values (CSV) format.