The International Soil Moisture Network: supporting and advancing EO research through open source in-situ soil moisture observations

For over a decade, the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN) has been providing free in-situ soil moisture data for validating and improving global satellite soil moisture products, weather prediction, agricultural activities, research and training as well as for the development of hydrological models. The ISMN is a community-wide effort and aggregates soil moisture observations from several organizations, harmonizes them and provides a centralized platform where end users can access them. Presently, the ISMN consists of over 72 soil moisture networks and more than 2800 stations spread across the globe. For more than a decade, the ISMN has been funded by European Space Agency and established, developed and maintained by Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), Austria.

For continuing development, outreach and maintenance of the ISMN, a sustainable and long-term support is required. In order to achieve such long-term support, the ISMN will be transferring to the German Federal Institute of Hydrology (BfG) and connected International Center for Water Resources and Global Change (ICWRGC) in Germany within 2022. While BfG and ICWRGC (operating under the auspice of UNESCO and WMO) will host and maintain the ISMN data facility, long-term financial support will be provided by the German Federal Institute of Hydrology through the Federal Ministry of Digital Infrastructure and Transport.

The ICWRGC has being coordinating the Global Terrestrial Network – Hydrology (GTN-H) as well as Global Environment Monitoring System for Freshwater (GEMS/Water Data Center) for several years. Hence, the center has an extensive experience, resources as well as scientific advisory support for a long-term sustainable operation and maintenance of the ISMN. As we look forward to a new future of ISMN, we also want to maintain, even improve on the great community support the project has received.

Therefore, our presentation aims to give an overview of the contribution of ISMN to research and training development, provides recent updates regarding the data service and ongoing technical developments. Furthermore, we want to introduce the new host as well as presenting the future outlook of the ISMN, which include setting up scientific advisory board with members from relevant UN organizations, key data providers and data users that would help promote and develop the ISMN further. Through the connection to UN organizations, member states could be encouraged to share their operational soil moisture data with the ISMN for continuing support of global climate and water resources observations. We also look forward to gaining new collaborations that will help in extending the ISMN database, initiate discussion between stakeholders to improve visibility and scientific advancement of the ISMN as well as promoting the importance of soil moisture within global earth observations data products.