A flux tower site attribute dataset intended for land surface modeling

Land surface models (LSMs) should have reliable forcing, validation, and surface attribute data as the foundation for effective model development and improvement. Eddy covariance flux tower data are considered the benchmarking data for LSMs. We conducted a comprehensive quality screening of the existing reprocessed flux tower dataset, including the proportion of gap-filled data, external disturbances, and energy balance closure (EBC), leading to 90 high-quality sites. For these sites, we collected vegetation, soil, topography information, and wind speed measurement height from literature, regional networks, and Biological, Ancillary, Disturbance, and Metadata (BADM) files. Then we obtained the final flux tower attribute dataset by global data product complement and plant functional types (PFTs) classification.

The dataset comprises a total of 90 NetCDF files. Each site's data is formatted within a NetCDF file named according to the site name, database, and attributes (vegetation, soil, topography, and reference height), such as ‘AT-Neu_FLUXNET2015_Veg_Soil_ Topography_ReferenceHeight.nc’. This dataset addresses the lack of site attribute data to some extent, reduces uncertainty in LSMs data source, and aids in diagnosing parameter as well as process deficiencies.