The DFG Priority Program 1803 "EarthShape - Earth Surface Shaping by Biota” (www.earthshape.net, short description of the project below) installed a meteorological station network consisting of four stations between ~26 °S to ~38 °S in the Coastal Cordillera of Chile, South America. The stations are intended to provide baseline meteorological data along the climate and ecological gradient investigated in the EarthShape program. The stations are located in the EarthShape study areas, encompassing desert, semi-desert, mediterranean, and temperate climate zones. Each station is configured to include sensors that record precipitation at ground level, radiation at 2.8 m height, wind at 3 m height, 25 cm depth soil temperature, soil water content and bulk electrical conductivity, 2 m air temperature and relative humidity, and barometric pressure at 30-minute intervals. The data recording started in March/April 2016. The EarthShape project runs until December 2021. Data collection will continue until that date, and potentially longer depending on available funds.

This publication provides two sets of data: raw data and processed data. The raw data contains 2 file types per meteorological station: (1) all measured parameters of the whole dataset measured in 30 minutes intervals as downloaded from the station. Furthermore, we provide (2) one table per station of high-resolution precipitation events, measured in 5 min. intervals that were triggered during rain events at each station. The processed data consists of a continuous timeseries of observations since the activation of each station. The processing consists of the exclusion of erroneous data, caused by maintenance of the weather-stations and sporadic malfunction of sensors detected during data screening. The excluded data is communicated in a logfile (excel table), comments from data screening, solar eclipse and others are summarized in history files (ASCII ). the full description of the data and methods is provided in the data description file (Data description file).

Version history:

16 January 2023 (Version 1.1): Alexander Beer included as additional author, addition of new data from 2020-04-14 bis 2022-10-10. All files of the first version are moved to the "previous-versions" folder.

09 October 2023 (Version 1.2): Addition of new time series data to 2023-07-31. Detailed changelog information can be found in the “History” files in the respective subfolders for each site.

"EarthShape - Earth Surface Shaping by Biota" bridges between scientific disciplines and includes geoscientists and biologists to study from different viewpoints the complex question how microorganisms, animals, and plants influence the shape and development of the Earth’s surface over time scales from the present-day to the distant geologic past. All study sites are located in the north-to-south trending Coastal Cordillera mountains of Chile, South America. These sites span from the Atacama Desert in the north to the Araucaria forests approximately 1300 km to the south. The site selection contains a large ecological and climate gradient ranging from very dry to humid climate conditions.