European daily dataset of soil moisture from in situ meteorological observations
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).
Simple
- Date (Publication)
- 2026-02-01
- Edition
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1
- Citation identifier
- urn:xkdc:ds:nl.knmi::ECAD_soil_water_content/1.0/
- Purpose
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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.
- Status
- On going
- Point of contact
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Organisation name Individual name Electronic mail address Role Koninklijk Nederlands Meteorologisch Instituut (KNMI)
Point of contact
- Maintenance and update frequency
- Annually
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DG Discovery Properties Vocabulary 1.0
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Climate
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Soil moisture
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Drought
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Insitu
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Observations
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- Use limitation
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The dataset contains point values and use as area averages requires caution. The inputdata is not homogenized, trend calculations should be done with caution.
- Access constraints
- Intellectual property rights
- Other constraints
- Classification
- Unclassified
- Spatial representation type
- Vector
- Language
- English
- Character set
- UTF8
- Topic category
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- Climatology, meteorology, atmosphere
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- Begin date
- 1852-09-01
- End date
- 9999-12-31
- Supplemental Information
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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.
- Reference system identifier
- http://www.opengis.net/def/crs/EPSG/0/4326
- Distribution format
-
Name Version TXT
1.0
- Distributor contact
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Organisation name Individual name Electronic mail address Role Koninklijk Nederlands Meteorologisch Instituut (KNMI)
Point of contact
Digital transfer options
- OnLine resource
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Protocol Linkage Name landingpage
https://dataplatform.knmi.nl/catalog/datasets/index.html?x-dataset=ECAD_soil_water_content&x-dataset-version=1.0 KNMI Data Platform
- Hierarchy level
- Dataset
- Statement
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Calculated soil moisture based on meteorological parameters observed at weather stations
Metadata
- File identifier
- 8c03be5a-fda8-11f0-bd6b-67b54c258801 XML
- Metadata language
- English
- Character set
- UTF8
- Hierarchy level
- Dataset
- Date stamp
- 2026-04-30T07:42:18.807087Z
- Metadata standard name
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ISO 19115
- Metadata standard version
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ISO 19115:2003 NL Kernset 1.3 KNMI 2.1.0
- Metadata author
-
Organisation name Individual name Electronic mail address Role Koninklijk Nederlands Meteorologisch Instituut (KNMI)
Point of contact
- Other language
-
Language Character encoding Dutch; Flemish English UTF8
Overviews
Spatial extent
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