y@engr. (J.D. Ni Summary Soil moisture patterns and dynamics are important for numerous applications such as flood forecasting, climate modeling, and management of agricultural lands. Unfortunately, widespread observations of soil moisture are not currently available at the spatial scale of most of these applications. Given these data limitations and the complexity of soil moisture dynamics, th...

Soil moisture predictability and the associated predictability of continental climate are explored as an initialvalue problem, using a coupled land–atmosphere model with prescribed ocean surface temperatures. Ensemble simulations are designed to assess the extent to which initial soil moisture fields explain variance of future predictands (soil moisture, near-surface air temperature, and precip...

[1] This study identifies soil moisture spatial variability patterns using measurements across different extents (i.e., field, watershed, and basin) and depths (i.e., from surface to root zone profile) from 18 different soil moisture field experiments. The spatial variability patterns are well represented by negative exponential functions between the mean and the coefficient of variation of soi...

Soil moisture is a key part of Earth’s climate systems, including agricultural and hydrological cycles. Soil moisture data from satellite and numerical models is typically provided at a global scale with coarse spatial resolution, which is not enough for local and regional applications. In this study, a soil moisture downscaling model was developed using satellite-derived variables targeting Gl...

The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, developed by the European Space Agency (ESA), will be launched in the second half of 2009. It will be the first L-band (~1.4 GHz) passive microwave satellite specifically designed for global soil moisture observations, with an expected accuracy for the retrieved soil moisture of ~0.04 m/m. While passive microwave observations have been widely...

[1] A multi-scale soil moisture and temperature monitoring network, consisting of 55 soil moisture and temperature measurement stations, has been established in central Tibetan Plateau (TP). In this study, the station-averaged surface soil moisture data from the network are used to evaluate four soil moisture products retrieved from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-Earth Observing Sys...

In regions affected by seasonal and permanently frozen conditions soil moisture influences the thermal regime of the ground as well as its ice content, which is one of the main factors controlling the sensitivity of mountain permafrost to climate changes. In this study, several well established soil moisture monitoring techniques were combined with data from geophysical measurements to assess t...

The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity Mission (SMOS) acquires surface soil moisture data of global coverage every three days. Product validation for a range of climate and environmental conditions across continents is a crucial step. For this purpose, a soil moisture and soil temperature sensor network was established in the Skjern River Catchment, Denmark. The objectives of this article are to ...