This dataset includes data recorded by the Heihe integrated observatory network obtained from a Cosmic-ray Soil Moisture Observing System of soil moisture of Arou Superstation from January 1 to December 31, 2025. The site (100.4643° E, 38.0473° N) was located in the Caodaban Village, near Qilian County in Qinghai Province. The elevation is 3033 m. The bottom of the probe was 0.5 m above the ground; the sampling interval was 1 hour.
The raw COSMOS data include the following: battery (Batt, V), temperature (T, C), relative humidity (RH, %), air pressure (P, hPa), fast neutron counts (N1C, counts per hour), thermal neutron counts (N2C, counts per hour), sample time of fast neutrons (N1ET, s), and sample time of thermal neutrons (N2ET, s). The distributed data include the following variables: Date, Time, P, N1C, N1C_cor (corrected fast neutron counts) and VWC (volume soil moisture, %), which were processed as follows:
1) Data were removed and replaced by -9999 when (a) the battery voltage was less than 11.8 V, (b) the relative humidity was greater than 80% inside the probe box, (c) the counting data were not of one-hour duration and (d) neutron count differed from the previous value by more than 20%; 2) An air pressure correction was applied to the quality-controlled raw data according to the equation contained in the equipment manual; 3) After the quality control and corrections were applied, soil moisture was calculated using the equation in Zreda et al. (2012), where N0 is the neutron counts above dry soil and the other variables are fitted constants that define the shape of the calibration function. Here, the parameter N0 was calibrated using the in situ observed soil moisture by SoilNET within the footprint; 4) Based on the calibrated N0 and corrected N1C, the hourly soil moisture was computed using the equation from the equipment manual. Moreover, suspicious data were marked in red.
For more information, please refer to Liu et al. (2018) (for sites information), Zhu et al. (2015) for data processing) in the Citation section.
Daman Superstation in the upstream of the Heihe integrated observatory network.
Processing and sorting raw data.
This work is licensed under
CC BY 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License).
CSTR:11738.11.ncdc.heihe.db7633.2026
10.12072/ncdc.heihe.db7633.2026
