<p>Soil moisture is recognized as an Essential Climate Variable (ECV) because it is crucial for assessing water availability for plants and hence food production. Having long time series of freely available soil moisture data with global coverage enables scientists, farmers and decision makers to detect trends, assess the impacts of climate change, and develop adaptation strategies.</p> <p>The collection, harmonization and archiving of in situ soil moisture data was the motivation to establish the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN) at TU Wien, with the financial support of the European Space Agency (ESA), in 2009 as a community effort. The ISMN became an essential source for validating and improving global satellite products, and climate, land surface, and hydrological models. In 2021 permanent funding for the ISMN operations was secured through the German Government (Ministry of Digital and Transport).</p> <p>The transfer of the ISMN to its new host, i.e., the International Centre for Water Resources and Global Change (ICWRGC)/German Federal Institute of Hydrology (BfG), took place during 2021/2022. The takeover posed the challenge to migrate an operational service between two different teams, locations/hardware and organisations. Finally, the ISMN started serving data from its new host in December 2022 while keeping the service continuously running throughout the migration. In parallel the team in Vienna developed and launched a new dataviewer. This presentation aims at showcasing new ISMN features as well as recent data contributions as well as next evolution of the ISMN based on synergies and science outcome of the Research and Development activities performed by ESA in the context of the Fiducial Reference Measurements for Soil Moisture (FRM4SM) project.</p>
<p>For over a decade, the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN) has been providing free in-situ soil moisture data for validating and improving global satellite soil moisture products, weather prediction, agricultural activities, research and training as well as for the development of hydrological models. The ISMN is a community-wide effort and aggregates soil moisture observations from several organizations, harmonizes them and provides a centralized platform where end users can access them. Presently, the ISMN consists of over 72 soil moisture networks and more than 2800 stations spread across the globe. For more than a decade, the ISMN has been funded by European Space Agency and established, developed and maintained by Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), Austria.</p><p>For continuing development, outreach and maintenance of the ISMN, a sustainable and long-term support is required. In order to achieve such long-term support, the ISMN will be transferring to the German Federal Institute of Hydrology (BfG) and connected International Center for Water Resources and Global Change (ICWRGC) in Germany within 2022. While BfG and ICWRGC (operating under the auspice of UNESCO and WMO) will host and maintain the ISMN data facility, long-term financial support will be provided by the German Federal Institute of Hydrology through the Federal Ministry of Digital Infrastructure and Transport.</p><p>The ICWRGC has being coordinating the Global Terrestrial Network &#8211; Hydrology (GTN-H) as well as Global Environment Monitoring System for Freshwater (GEMS/Water Data Center) for several years. Hence, the center has an extensive experience, resources as well as scientific advisory support for a long-term sustainable operation and maintenance of the ISMN. As we look forward to a new future of ISMN, we also want to maintain, even improve on the great community support the project has received.</p><p>Therefore, our presentation aims to give an overview of the contribution of ISMN to research and training development, provides recent updates regarding the data service and ongoing technical developments. Furthermore, we want to introduce the new host as well as presenting the future outlook of the ISMN, which include setting up scientific advisory board with members from relevant UN organizations, key data providers and data users that would help promote and develop the ISMN further. Through the connection to UN organizations, member states could be encouraged to share their operational soil moisture data with the ISMN for continuing support of global climate and water resources observations. We also look forward to gaining new collaborations that will help in extending the ISMN database, initiate discussion between stakeholders to improve visibility and scientific advancement of the ISMN as well as promoting the importance of soil moisture within global earth observations data products.</p>
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