Gap-free global annual soil moisture: 15 km grids for 1991-2018

Abstract

Soil moisture is key for understanding soil plant atmosphere interactions. We provide a soil mois ture pattern recognition framework to increase the spatial resolution and fill gaps of the ESA-CCI (European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative v4.5) soil moisture dataset, which contains > 40 years of satellite soil moisture global grids with a spatial resolution of ∼ 27 km. We use terrain parameters coupled with bioclimatic and soil type information to predict finer-grained (i.e., downscaled) satellite soil moisture. We assess the im pact of terrain parameters on the prediction accuracy by cross-validating downscaled soil moisture with and without the support of bioclimatic and soil type information. The outcome is a dataset of gap-free global mean annual soil moisture predictions and associated prediction variances for 28 years (1991 2018) across 15 km grids. We use independent in situ records from the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN, 987 stations) and in situ precipitation records (171 additional stations) only for evaluating the new dataset. Cross-validated correlation between observed and predicted soil moisture values varies from r = 0.69 to r = 0.87 with root mean squared errors (RMSEs, m3 m-3) around 0.03 and 0.04. Our soil moisture predictions improve (a) the correlation with the ISMN (when compared with the original ESA-CCI dataset) from r = 0.30 (RMSE = 0.09, unbiased RMSE (ubRMSE) = 0.37) to r = 0.66 (RMSE = 0.05, ubRMSE = 0.18) and (b) the correlation with local precipitation records across boreal (from r = < 0.3 up to r = 0.49) or tropical areas (from r = < 0.3 to r = 0.46) which are currently poorly represented in the ISMN. Temporal trends show a decline of global annual soil moisture using (a) data from the ISMN (-1.5[-1.8,-1.24] %), (b) associated locations from the original ESA-CCI dataset (-0.87[-1.54,-0.17] %), (c) associated locations from predictions based on terrain parame ters (-0.85[-1.01,-0.49] %), and (d) associated locations from predictions including bioclimatic and soil type information (-0.68[-0.91,-0.45] %). We provide a new soil moisture dataset that has no gaps and higher gran ularity together with validation methods and a modeling approach that can be applied worldwide (Guevara et al., 2020, https://doi.org/10.4211/hs.9f981ae4e68b4f529cdd7a5c9013e27e).