Question about converting soil OC (g/100g) and BD (g/cm³) to CLM5.0 ORGANIC (kg/m³)

C

chenyihui

chen
New Member
Hi all,

I am currently working on replacing the soil organic matter variable (ORGANIC) in CLM5.0 surfdata.

However, the dataset does not provide ORGANIC directly. It provides:
  • Soil organic carbon (OC): unit = g/100g (mass content of organic carbon in fine earth fraction)
  • Bulk density (BD): unit = g/cm³ (oven dry)
The required unit for ORGANIC in CLM5.0 is kg/m³.

Based on my understanding, ORGANIC represents the density of soil organic matter (SOM). Therefore, I derived the following conversion formula:

ORGANIC (kg/m³) = OC (g/100g) × BD (g/cm³) × 10 / 0.58

Where:
  • 10 converts OC from g/100g to g/kg
  • 0.58 assumes that SOM contains ~58% carbon (i.e., SOM = OC / 0.58) , see surfdata.nc like figure1
My questions to the community are:
  1. Is this conversion (especially using the 0.58 factor) widely accepted in CLM5.0 data preprocessing practices?
  2. Has anyone used the same dataset or a similar one? How did you handle the conversion?
Any suggestions, references, or shared experiences would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you very much for your time and help.


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