A dataset of the observations of carbon, water and heat fluxes over an alpine meadow in Haibei (2015–2020)

Abstract

Covering an area of 5.04×105 km2 on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, Alpine meadow is essential to the plateau ecological barrier function and regional sustainable development. Since May 2014, Haibei National Field Research Station for Alpine Grassland (Haibei Station hereafter) has been accumulating amounts of valuable data by employing eddy covariance techniques to continuously measure carbon and water cycles and energy exchanges between an alpine Graminoid-Kobresia meadow ecosystem and the atmosphere. In the following of data processing such as outlier removal and flux data gaps filled by boosted regression tree model, Haibei Station plans to publish a dataset of the continuous observations of carbon, water, and heat fluxes of the alpine meadow from 2015 to 2010. This dataset consists of the subsets of carbon, water, and heat fluxes data (i.e. net ecosystem CO2 exchange, ecosystem CO2 respiration, gross ecosystem CO2 exchange, latent heat flux, and sensible heat flux) and the subsets of routine meteorological data (i.e. air temperature, air relative humidity, total solar radiation, net radiation, photosynthetically active radiation, precipitation, soil temperature, volumetric soil moisture content). The temporal resolutions of the dataset are half-hourly, daily, monthly, and yearly scales. This dataset can be used to validate the parameters of processes-based ecological models of carbon and water cycles and to evaluate the spatiotemporal patterns and evolution trends in ecological functions of carbon sequestration and water-holding capacity in alpine meadow ecosystems.