Modeled and observed soil moisture variability over a region of Argentina

Abstract

The aim of this study is to document how soil moisture variability is represented by global analyses and regional atmospheric models compared with a unique dataset of sparse measurements over an agricultural productive area of Argentina. Results show that normalized simulated soil moisture values and their temporal variability are largely different from the observations. However, there is a strong agreement among values derived using the same land surface model, suggesting a strong influence of the forcing fields used by the different analyses/simulations. This work also discusses possible sources of model limitations for representing soil moisture variability over the region. © 2011 Royal Meteorological Society.