Data associated with manuscript ("An Effective Medium Theory-Based Unified Model for Estimating Thermal Conductivity of Unfrozen and Frozen Soils") submitted to Catena

Datasets associated with manuscript “An Effective Medium Theory-Based Unified Model for Estimating Thermal Conductivity in Unfrozen and Frozen Soils” submitted to CatenaThe dataset includes two excel files. One is "optimized models for selected samples.xlsx", and the other is “trained unified & testing 3 models.xlsx”."optimized models for selected samples.xlsx": three soil samples with measurements were selected to present the ability of the unified model and existing models. These models were optimized to best fit the measurements.Columns:“measurement”: measured thermal conductivity;“ck2005”, “tian2016”, “gd2016”, “unified”: predicted thermal conductivities by the individual models;“fr_high”: high-conductivity fraction. It is liquid water content for unfrozen soils, and liquid and ice content for frozen soils.“trained unified & testing 3 models.xlsx”: the training dataset were first used to build the pedotransfer functions for three parameters of the unified model (results in sheets “training-unfrozen” and “training-frozen”). The testing dataset were then used to evaluate the three models (results in sheets “testing-unfrozen” and “testing-frozen”).Columns:“fr_cr”:the critical volume fraction;“ts”: the scaling exponent;“alpha”: the compensating factor;“volume water content”: initial water content at the onset of freezing;Units:measured temperature in [°C];dry bulk density in [kg m-3];porosity in [m3 m-3];volume water content in [m3 m-3];measured/predicted thermal conductivity in [Wm-1°C-1].