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

Abstract

Abstract. 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., 2011a, b). The ISMN brings together in situ soil moisture measurements collected and freely shared by a multitude of organisations, harmonizes 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). 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 December 2020, the ISMN now contains data of 65 networks and 2678 stations located all over the globe, with a time period spanning from 1952 to present.The number of networks and stations covered by the ISMN is still growing and many of the data sets contained in the database continue to be updated. 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 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.

Regionalizing Root‐Zone Soil Moisture Estimates From ESA CCI Soil Water Index Using Machine Learning and Information on Soil, Vegetation, and Climate

“…Ground measurements from the ISMN (W. Dorigo et al., 2021; W. A. Dorigo et al., 2011, 2013) data were considered for the calibration of T value. The ISMN data set comprises the most comprehensive collection of soil moisture measurements globally.…”

A global 1‐km downscaled SMAP soil moisture product based on thermal inertia theory

“…The purpose of developing the ISMN database was to validate and improve global remote sensing/LSM products. A number of investigations have been conducted to evaluate the SM measurements by ISMN (Dorigo et al, 2011(Dorigo et al, , 2013(Dorigo et al, , 2021Gruber et al, 2013;Schaefer et al, 2007). In this study, we acquired the 0-to-5-cm soil layer SM measurements for 427 stations from eight dense SM networks from https://ismn.geo.tuwien.ac.at/.…”

A Novel Fusion Method for Generating Surface Soil Moisture Data With High Accuracy, High Spatial Resolution, and High Spatio‐Temporal Continuity

“…Presently, ISMN is one of the most commonly used platforms to collect and publish globally distributed in-situ soil moisture data (Dorigo et al, 2021). In this study, the HOAL network, a densely distributed soil moisture network from ISMN, was introduced as the primary source of in-situ soil moisture measurements.…”