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A. Gruber, A. Xaver, W. Dorigo, M. Drusch:
"Quality characterisation of the in-situ soil moisture observations within the International Soil Moisture Network";
Talk: Joint Meeting of the Second International Soil Sensing Technology Conference, the Soil Physics Technical Committee Annual Meeting, and the ASA Sensor-based Water Management Community, Honolulu, Hawaii; 2012-01-03 - 2012-01-07.

The International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN) is a platform for collecting and redistributing in situ soil moisture measurements from existing soil moisture networks. Incoming data is harmonized in terms of units and sampling intervals as well as in the provided metadata before being stored in the database. Furthermore, a basic flagging scheme is used to describe the data quality without manipulating it, which will be extended in the near future.
A web interface allows the user to easily query and download the data. Special care has been taken to make downloads compliant with international data and metadata standards. In a short time the ISMN has evolved into one of the most prominent platforms for exchanging in situ soil moisture data containing more than 700 stations from 24 networks.
Nevertheless, the data implemented in the ISMN is very inhomogeneous in terms of the observation depths, reaching from a few centimetres up to several meters, used measurement techniques (e.g. TDR/FDR probes, capacitance probes), and sensor calibrations. This results in differences in the characteristics and quality of the measurements and complicates a straightforward global comparison of the in-situ measurements with satellite products or land surface models. In the presentation we will show novel methods to describe the characteristics of the different networks, stations and datasets and propose a quality control procedure for enhanced flagging of the individual measurements. The suggested quality indicators aim to provide a valuable support for selecting and weighting the individual datasets and measurements in the validation process.

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_207212.pdf