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W. Dorigo, P. van Oevelen, M. Drusch, W. Wagner, K. Scipal, S. Mecklenburg:
"Advances, experiences, and prospects of the International Soil Moisture Network";
Talk: American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting 2012, San Francisco, CA, USA (invited); 2012-12-03 - 2012-12-07.

In 2009, the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN; http:www.ipf.tuwien.ac.at) was initiated as a platform to support calibration and validation of soil moisture products from remote sensing and land surface models, and to advance studies on the behavior of soil moisture over space and time. This international initiative is fruit of continuing coordinative efforts of the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) in cooperation with the Group of Earth Observation (GEO) and the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS). The decisive financial incentive was given by the European Space Agency (ESA) who considered the establishment of the network critical for optimizing the soil moisture products from the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission.
The ISMN collects and harmonizes ground-based soil moisture data sets from a large variety of individually operating networks and makes them available through a centralized data portal. Meanwhile, almost 6000 soil moisture data sets from over 1300 sites, distributed among 34 networks worldwide, are contained in the database. The steadily increasing number of organizations voluntarily contributing to the ISMN, and the rapidly increasing number of studies based on the network show that the portal has been successful in reaching its primary goal to promote easy data accessibility to a wide variety of users.
Recently, several updates of the system were performed to keep up with the increasing data amount and traffic, and to meet the requirements of many advanced users. Many datasets from operational networks (e.g., SCAN, the US Climate Reference Network, COSMOS, and ARM) are now assimilated and processed in the ISMN on a fully automated basis in near-real time. In addition, a new enhanced quality control system is currently being implemented. This presentation gives an overview of these recent developments, presents some examples of important scientific results based on the ISMN, and sketches an outlook for mid- to long-term operation.