2.6. ISMN Data

Description

The International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN) is a coordinated international effort to obtain and process a wide variety of soil observations. They provide an open-source global data hosting facility containing in situ soil moisture data as well as accompanying soil variables such as soil temperature and relevant site meteorology such as precipitation and air temperature.

See https://ismn.earth/en/about-us-test/ or https://ismn.bafg.de/en/ for more information.

Sample image

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Recommended use

Verification of near surface temperature, precipitation, snowpack, and soil moisture and temperature from NWP models using point-stat for reforecast or near-real time applications. Care must be taken to understand point to grid representativeness issues, as well as the concept of comparing volumetric soil moisture between models and observations.

File format

ASCII. See https://ismn.earth/en/data/formats/ for more details.

Location of data

https://ismn.earth/en/data/

Access restrictions

Registration for a free account is required to download ISMN data. There are also other terms and conditions, which can be found here: https://ismn.bafg.de/en/terms-and-conditions/.

Spatial resolution, grid, or coverage

Point observations, irregularly spaced around the globe. Stations are much more prevalent in North America and Europe.

Temporal resolution

Networks have different temporal sampling intervals. Historical networks are intermittent (e.g., only a few times a month), other networks have daily average, hourly, or several times per hour observations. See https://ismn.earth/en/data/data-availability/ for more information.

Starting and/or ending dates

Varies by location. The user will need to check individual station records or information on the ISMN site to determine specific site records.

The entire archive covers 1952 to near real-time.

Data latency

Some networks update nearly daily, some update 1-2 times a month, others are more irregular. See https://ismn.earth/en/data/data-availability/ for more information.

Variables available

Precipitation, 2 m air temperature, snow water equivalent and depth, surface temperature, soil moisture at various depths, soil temperature at various depths, soil suction. See https://ismn.earth/en/data/data-availability/ for more information.

METplus Use Cases

Link to METplus Use Cases for this dataset.

Keywords

Note

Current Dataset: VxDataISMN

Note

Data Labels: DataTypePoint, DataLevelSurface, DataApplicationLandSurface