The International Soil Moisture Network: serving Earth system science for over a decade

Wouter Dorigo (1) , Irene Himmelbauer , Daniel Aberer , Lukas Schremmer , Ivana Petrakovic , Luca Zappa , Wolfgang Preimesberger , Angelika Xaver , Frank Annor , Jonas Ardö , Dennis Baldocchi , Marco Bitelli , Günter Blöschl , Heye Bogena , Luca Brocca , Jean-Christophe Calvet (2) , J Julio Camarero , Giorgio Capello , Minha Choi , Michael C Cosh , Nick van de Giesen , Istvan Hajdu , Jaakko Ikonen , Karsten H Jensen , Kasturi Devi Kanniah , Ileen de Kat , Gottfried Kirchengast , Pankaj Kumar Rai , Jenni Kyrouac , Kristine Larson , Suxia Liu , Alexander Loew , Mahta Moghaddam , José Martínez Fernández , Cristian Mattar Bader , Renato Morbidelli , Jan P Musial , Elise Osenga , Michael A Palecki , Thierry Pellarin , George P Petropoulos , Isabella Pfeil , Jarrett Powers , Alan Robock , Christoph Rüdiger , Udo Rummel , Michael Strobel , Zhongbo Su , Ryan Sullivan , Torbern Tagesson , Andrej Varlagin , Mariette Vreugdenhil , Jeffrey Walker , Jun Wen , Fred Wenger , Jean Pierre Wigneron , Mel Woods , Kun Yang , Yijian Zeng , Xiang Zhang , Marek Zreda , Stephan Dietrich , Alexander Gruber , Peter van Oevelen , Wolfgang Wagner , Klaus Scipal , Matthias Drusch , Roberto Sabia

1 Department of Geodesy and Geoinformation, TU Wien
2 CNRM - Centre national de recherches météorologiques

In 2009, the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN) was initiated as a community effort, funded by the European Space Agency, to serve as a centralised data hosting facility for globally available in situ soil moisture measurements (Dorigo et al., 2011b, a). The ISMN brings together in situ soil moisture measurements collected and freely shared by a multitude of organisations, harmonises them in terms of units and sampling rates, applies advanced quality control, and stores them in a database. Users can freely retrieve the data from this database through an online web portal (https://ismn.earth/en/, last access: 28 October 2021). Meanwhile, the ISMN has evolved into the primary in situ soil moisture reference database worldwide, as evidenced by more than 3000 active users and over 1000 scientific publications referencing the data sets provided by the network. As of July 2021, the ISMN now contains the data of 71 networks and 2842 stations located all over the globe, with a time period spanning from 1952 to the present. The number of networks and stations covered by the ISMN is still growing, and approximately 70 % of the data sets contained in the database continue to be updated on a regular or irregular basis. The main scope of this paper is to inform readers about the evolution of the ISMN over the past decade, including a description of network and data set updates and quality control procedures. A comprehensive review of the existing literature making use of ISMN data is also provided in order to identify current limitations in functionality and data usage and to shape priorities for the next decade of operations of this unique community-based data repository.

Domaines: Sciences de l'environnement

Wouter Dorigo, Irene Himmelbauer, Daniel Aberer, Lukas Schremmer, Ivana Petrakovic, et al.. The International Soil Moisture Network: serving Earth system science for over a decade. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 2021, 25 (11), pp.5749 - 5804. ⟨10.5194/hess-25-5749-2021⟩. ⟨meteo-03478163⟩