Context
The Mean Soil Moisture index is relevant to forestry, water management and, to a lesser degree, in agriculture.
This Index is based on soil moisture content and is part of the Drought Hazard type of the Wet and Dry category of the classification. A higher/lower value indicates higher/lower soil moisture content.
Definition
The soil moisture is defined as the monthly mean values of soil moisture in the root zone as the fraction of the field capacity volume over a 30 year period.
Data Sources
The data was assembled on behalf of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) based on climate projections hosted on the C3S Climate Data Store (CDS). The Index data is from a set of 30-year statistics from two hydrological models (forced by eight bias-corrected multi-model simulations from the EURO-CORDEX experiment. The hydrological models are from the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI, E-HYPE model) and Wageningen University (VIC-WIR Model). The hydrological simulations have a 5km x 5km resolution and cover scenarios RCP4.5 and RCP8.5. More information about the dataset can be found in the corresponding CDS documentation resources.
Supporting Information
Further information about this application can be found in the ECDE application User Guide and the Data and datasets underpining the ECDE. More information can also be found on other sections of the EEA site:
- The Index based interactive EEA report: Wet and dry - Drought (link).