Observing soil moisture at the ground is essential to assess plant available water, manage water resources and calibrate, validate satellite products and conduct climate impact studies. Unfortunately, the availability of in situ observations is very limited in space and time. Whereas the spatial distribution is biased towards the global North, the average temporal variability of soil moisture time series is on average 10 years as can be seen from the largest archive of in situ soil moisture, the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN). Apart of the data availability issues, a substantial amount of the in situ observations face data quality issues that might result from sensor deployment, sensor calibration, data processing or other error sources.
This session is meant to address issues in the development and deployment of state-of-the-art soil moisture observation networks, the financing of its long-term operation, data quality assurance, as well as sensor deployment and assessments of differences between these deployments. We further encourage contributions presenting developments of novel measurement techniques including citizen science initiatives and studies utilizing in situ soil moisture for water availability assessments.