We devise a new realization of the surface code on a rectangular lattice of qubits utilizing single-qubit and nearest-neighbor two-qubit Pauli measurements and three auxiliary qubits per plaquette. This realization gains substantial advantages over prior pairwise measurement-based realizations of the surface code. It has a short operation period of 4 steps and our performance analysis for a standard circuit noise model yields a high fault-tolerance threshold of approximately <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/…