Data Sources

RefET

Meteorological data can be obtained from numerous sources.

Agricultural Weather Networks

Network	Supporting Organization	Coverage
CoAgMet	Colorado State University	Colorado
AZMET	University of Arizona	Arizona
AgWeatherNet	Washington State University	Washington

AgWeatherNet | Washington State University | Washington |

AgriMet-GP	Bureau of Reclamation Great Plains Regional Office	Montana
AgriMet-PN	Bureau of Reclamation Pacific Northwest Regional Office	Washington, Oregon, California (northern), Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Montana
CIMIS	California Department of Water Resources	California
NICE Net	Desert Research Institute	Nevada
West Texas Mesonet	Texas Tech University	Texas (western)

Other Weather Networks

Network	Supporting Organization	Coverage
Montana Mesonet	University of Montana	Montana
TexMesonet	Texas Water Development Board	Texas
Lower Colorado River Authority Hydromet	Lower Colorado River Authority (TX)	Texas (Colorado River Basin)
Kansas Mesonet	Kansas State University	Kansas
Nebraska Mesonet	University of Nebraska, Lincoln	Nebraska
Mesonet	University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University	Oklahoma

Multi-Network Sources

Source	Supporting Organization	Coverage
MesoWest and SynopticLabs	University of Utah	United States
Integrated Surface Database	NOAA National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI)	Global

CropET

Study Area

HUC8 and HUC10 features can be extracted from the full - [USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset] (WBD) geodatabase. A subset of the WBD HUC polygons can downloaded using the [USDA Geospatial Data Gateway] or the full dataset can be downloaded using the [USGS FTP] : ftp://rockyftp.cr.usgs.gov/vdelivery/Datasets/Staged/WBD

County features can be downloaded from the [USDA Geospatial Data Gateway]. For the zonal stats prep tool to work, the shapefile must have a field called “COUNTYNAME”. Other county features (such as the [US Census Cartographic Boundary Shapefiles] could eventually be supported (or the name field could be manually changed to COUNTYNAME).

The GRIDMET grid cells can be constructed how?

Crop Type Data

Cropland Data Layer (CDL)

The Cropland Data Layer (CDL) is a product of the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) with the mission “to provide timely, accurate and useful statistics in service to U.S. agriculture” (Boryan et al 2011). The CDL is a crop-specific land cover classification product of more than 100 crop categories grown in the United States developed using remote sensing. The CDL can be downloaded using NASS’s CropScape tool. Updates about and references for the CDL can be found at NASS. A version of the CDL has been released annually from 1994-Present.

## Soils Data

The average agricultural area available water capacity (AWC) and hydrologic soils group are needed for each ET cell/unit. The hydrologic soils group can be estimated based on the percent sand and clay for each ET cell/unit.

The AWC, percent clay, and percent sand data cannot (currently) be directly downloaded. The easiest way to obtain these soils data is to download the [STATSGO] database for the target state(s) using the [USDA Geospatial Data Gateway]. Shapefiles of the soil properties can be extracted using the [NRCS Soil Data Viewer] The [SSURGO] databases can also be used, but these typically cover a smaller area and may have areas of missing data.

It may also be possible to used the gridded SSURGO data, but this has not been tested.

Add additional details about which options were used in the Soil Data Viewer

To use the soil prep tools, the soils data must be provided as separate shapefiles for each product. The names of the soil shapefiles are hard coded in the rasterize_soil_polygons.py script as “{}_WTA_0to152cm_statsgo.shp”, where {} can be “AWC”, “Clay”, or “Sand” (see [Model Structure](structure.md)). For each shapefile, the value field name is hardcoded as the upper case of the property (i.e. “AWC”, “CLAY”, or “SAND”).