Era5-Land Invariant bands download issue

Software and Tools API
1

I’m trying to download “Soil Type” band from Era5-Land dataset ( ERA5-Land hourly data from 1950 to present ), when only “Soil Type” band is selected it doesn’t show up any year to select. But if any other band is selected along with this for example “10m u-component of wind”, it allows me to download the data and the downloaded zip contains even the Soil Type band.

I tried the same approach through the API, it’s returning the only “10m u-component of wind” band for the same date. This is the request

```
{
“variable”: [
“10m_u_component_of_wind”,
“soil_type”
],
“year”: “2025”,
“month”: “01”,
“day”: [“01”],
“download_format”: “unarchived”
}
```

Is there any other way to download the “Soil Type” band files through an API?

2

Hi,
please use the webform to build your API request and avoid errors. Soil type is an invariant parameter, so it doesn’t change in time:

import cdsapi

dataset = "reanalysis-era5-land"
request = {
    "variable": ["soil_type"],
    "data_format": "grib",
    "download_format": "unarchived"
}

client = cdsapi.Client()
client.retrieve(dataset, request).download()

Thanks

3

Hi Michela,

We are currently using the cdsapi to download time-varying variables (e.g., 2m temperature) from the ERA5 dataset. We also need the soil_type variable, which is invariant (static).

Is it possible to include soil_type in the same request as the time-varying variables, or should this be handled as a separate standalone request? If possible does the API duplicate the soil map for every time step in the output file?

Thanks