Global Land Cover Datasets
FAO Soil Units
This page provides access to and describes the GISS dataset "Global Distribution of FAO Soil Units at 1°×° Resolution", which distinguishes 27 soil types.
A more extensive version of these data including 106 soil units as well as soil texture and slope, is available as "DS 770.0: Staub and Rosenweig's GISS Soil and Surface Slope, 1-Degree", from the NCAR Data Support Section.
Available Information
Items which you may download here are:
- Dataset (25 kb, gzipped ASCII)
- Sample GIF image
- Sample Postscript image (49 kb, gzipped ASCII)
Explanation of Arrays
The contents of INFO1, INFO2, and INFO3 are:
GLOBAL FAO SOIL TYPES DIMENSION = 360 X 180 SCALE = 1 OCEAN = -9999 UNDEF = 99999 MIN = 1 MAX = 27 NUMREC = 6483 (NUMBER OF RECORDS IN DATA FILE)
The possible values of the elements in IARRAY are:
- acrisol
- cambisol
- chernozem
- podzoluvisol
- rendzina
- ferralsol
- gleysol
- phaeozem
- lithosol
- fluvisol
- kastanozem
- luvisol
- greyzem
- nitosol
- histosol
- podzosol
- arenosol
- regosol
- solonetz
- andosol
- ranker
- vertisol
- planosol
- xerosol
- yermosol
- solonchek
- ice
References
- Zobler, L. 1986. A world soil file for global climate modeling. NASA TM-87802. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Washington, D.C..