A Soil Moisture Monitoring and Forecast Network for Improved Water Resource Management and Risk Prediction.

Soil water is the lifeblood of Planet Earth and it affects virtually every process occurring in soil, including plant growth and crop production, microbial and root respiration, infiltration and groundwater recharge, carbon sequestration and loss, as well as security issues including runoff and flooding, drought and fire. Utah’s landscape is populated with hundreds of environmental monitoring stations, more than half of which include soil water content sensors for recording soil moisture at one or more depths. These records can provide valuable information for understanding the network’s current or historical soil moisture status. However, for planning purposes, access to a soil moisture forecast would provide additional benefits, similar to weather forecasts. For both soil- and weather-forecasts, computer-based numerical simulations of future conditions are required, which rely on current conditions, i.e., “initial condition”, as well as future “boundary” conditions such as temperature and precipitation. The United States Drought Monitor provides a monthly soil moisture outlook, but these maps are extremely coarse and have little utility or correlation to local conditions. The State of Oklahoma’s 107 station Mesonet is probably the nation’s leading environmental monitoring network providing all 77 counties with statewide estimates of climate variables, soil properties and fire-risk. In addition, daily soil moisture maps at 0.8 x 0.8 km resolution are generated using kriged soil moisture data from the Oklahoma Mesonet along with soil texture (percent sand) estimates from USDA-NRCS SSURGO and satellite-based precipitation estimates. Outside of the continental-scale soil moisture outlook, there are no soil moisture forecasts and no high-resolution soil moisture mapping networks like Oklahoma’s presently operational in the US to our knowledge. Because soil moisture affects so many other processes, a soil moisture network, mapped product and forecast can provide a high-resolution fire-, flood- and drought-risk assessment capability in addition to efficient irrigation management and other undeveloped opportunities connected to soil moisture.