The North American Soil Moisture Database: Online Soil Moisture Visualization and Comparison Tools

The North American Soil moisture Database (NASMD) was developed to provide a collection of spatially extensive soil moisture observations across the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The NASMD was developed in the Department of Geography at Texas A&M University and includes over 7 million daily soil moisture observations from over 1,800 monitoring stations across all 50 states, Canada and Mexico. Data are collected from multiple sources, quality controlled and incorporated into the online database. Along with soil moisture data, station metadata including the latitude and longitude, soil texture and dominant land cover are available. The NASMD website (soilmoisture.tamu.edu) provides all of the data, freely available to download. In line with the observations, we have developed a number of visualization and comparison tools. These include time series plots, comparative scatter plots between observations and satellite soil moisture products, and comparison statistics such as root mean square error and the Nash-Sutcliffe score for satellite and model product validation. The expansive online soil moisture database along with these tools is useful for drought monitoring and model/satellite calibration and validation.