Abstract

This dataset contains a pan-European dataset with time series for soil water content. For a total of 5758 stations (status January 2026) daily soil water content values are produced for the period for which all input data is available. Input data is from the European Climate Assessment & Dataset (ECA&D, https://www.ecad.eu) and are daily precipitation totals, daily averaged temperature, and global radiation sums. These data are input to the SoilClim model (Hlavinka et al. 2011, doi:10.1016/j.agwat.2011.03.011) which provides soil water contents values for the upper 10 cm, the root zone and the deeper layer of the soil. In this dataset, values for the surface and root zone are provided. Soil characteristics are taken from the widely used SoilGrids system (Hengl et al. 2017, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0169748).

Supplemental information

The SoilClim model results are validated against observations of actual evapotranspiration (ETa) from the FluxNet experiment. Calculated soil water content are compared against a selection of the observations of the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN). In the comparisons against observations, calculated values of ETa and soil water content (SWC) from the state-of-the-art soil dynamics model SWAP, which is more advanced than SoilClim, are used as well. The comparisons show that SoilClim and SWAP show generally the same behaviour albeit that SoilClim saturates more quickly than SWAP. On average, the similarity between the models and observation for ETa is higher (correlations 0.77 and 0.78 for SWAP and SoilClim respectively) than for the observed soil water content, where average correlations for the surface and rootzone vary between 0.52 and 0.62.


Metadata

Dataset name ECAD_soil_water_content
Dataset version 1.0
Status onGoing
Update frequency annually
File formats TXT
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) https://doi.org/10.21944/phk8-at71
Spatial representation type vector
License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
North bound latitude 69.7
East bound longitude 17.9
South bound latitude 27.8
West bound longitude 44.8
Dataset edition 1
Dataset manager Gerard van der Schrier
Maintainer KNMI Data Services
Publication date 2026-02-01
Reference system identifier EPSG4326
Dataset start time 1852-09-01
Dataset end time 9999-12-31
Identifier urn:xkdc:ds:nl.knmi::ECAD_soil_water_content/1.0/
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) https://doi.org/10.21944/phk8-at71
Lineage statement Calculated soil moisture based on meteorological parameters observed at weather stations
Purpose The purpose of the dataset is principally to monitor drought conditions in Europe and to provide a historic perspective of recent droughts in terms of its most direct metric: soil moisture. In addition, the dataset serves as a validation dataset to the climate modelling and satellite communities for their soil moisture datasets.
Use limitation The dataset contains point values and use as area averages requires caution. The inputdata is not homogenized, trend calculations should be done with caution.
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