Abstract
Abstract. Knowledge of water and energy fluxes is key for urban planning and design. Nevertheless, hydrological data from urban environments are sparse, and, as a result, many processes are still poorly understood and thus inadequately represented within models. We contribute to reducing this shortfall by providing a dataset that includes time series of soil moisture and soil temperature measured underneath 18 different permeable pavements (PPs) and 4 urban green spaces located within the city of Freiburg (Germany). Time series were recorded with a high temporal resolution of 10 min using a total of 65 individual soil moisture sensors and covering a measurement period of 2 years (November 2016–October 2018). The recorded time series contain valuable information on the soil hydrological behavior of PPs and demonstrate the effect of surface properties and surrounding urban structures on soil temperatures. In addition, we performed double-ring infiltration experiments, which in combination with the soil moisture measurements yielded soil hydrological parameters for the PPs, including porosity, field capacity and infiltration capacity. We present this unique dataset, which is a valuable source of information for studying urban water and energy cycles. We encourage its usage in various ways, e.g., for model calibration and validation purposes, study of thermal regimes of cities, and derivation of urban water and energy fluxes. The dataset is freely available from the FreiDok plus data repository at https://freidok.uni-freiburg.de/data/151573 and https://doi.org/10.6094/UNIFR/151573 (Schaffitel et al., 2019).
Highlights
Knowledge of urban water and energy fluxes is key for urban planning and design
We provide a unique dataset of soil moisture and soil temperatures measured within an urban environment
The observed water saturation potentially affects the bearing capacity and the frost resistance of the pavements but may lead to the formation of saturation overland flow. This contradicts the results of previous simulation studies, which revealed a limited effect of underlying soil layers on the hydrologic performance of permeable pavements (PPs) (Brunetti et al, 2016; Illgen et al, 2007)
Summary
Knowledge of urban water and energy fluxes is key for urban planning and design. there are various urban hydrological (see Elliott and Trowsdale, 2007, for a review of urban hydrological and drainage models) and energy balance models (see Grimmond et al, 2010, for an overview), there are only limited data available for validating and calibrating those models (Litvak et al, 2017; Salvadore et al, 2015; Schirmer et al, 2013). Impacts on the water balance include increased surface runoff volumes (Fletcher et al, 2013; Shuster et al, 2005) at the expense of soil infiltration (Cristiano et al, 2017; Salvadore et al, 2015; Schirmer et al, 2013) and evapotranspiration (Fletcher et al, 2013; Grimmond and Oke, 1991). One example is the partitioning of rainfall into surface runoff and infiltration, which depends decisively on the state of the soil storage (Brocca et al, 2008) This partitioning is of special interest for urban stormwater management, the effect of θ on the hydrologic performance of PPs is still under debate. We are convinced that the provided dataset is of great value for studying urban water and energy fluxes and encourage its usage within the fields of urban hydrology and urban climatology
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