Meeting summary: GEWEX/BAHC international workshop on soil moisture monitoring, analysis, and prediction for hydrometeorological and hydroclimatological applications

The International Workshop on Soil Moisture Monitoring, Analysis, and Prediction for Hydrometeorological and Hydroclimatological Applications considered the potential for implementing a global system during this decade and for identifying the priorities for the research needed to achieve such a global system. The workshop attendees advised that a global system should provide measurements and/or estimates of volumetric soil water content on at least a daily basis at 50-km resolution and at vertical resolutions consistent with vegetative rooting depths within the resolution grid. It was generally agreed that a global soil moisture monitoring system would be model based with in situ and remotely sensed measurements used primarily for validation and evaluation of the model-derived fields. The consensus of the workshop participants was that a global system for soil moisture is needed and, furthermore, a system could be implemented on an experimental basis with tools currently available. However, many future improvements were seen as essential to make such a system fully operational. Among the several workshop recommendations, it was strongly recommended that the development of a global system to produce model-derived estimates of soil moisture should be started immediately.