. Framed within the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) of the European Commission,
the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is producing an enhanced global dataset for the land component of the fifth generation of European ReAnalysis (ERA5), hereafter referred to as ERA5-Land. Once completed, the period covered will span from 1950 to the present, with continuous updates to support land monitoring applications. ERA5-Land describes the evolution of the water and energy cycles over land in a consistent manner over the production period, which, among others, could be used to analyse trends and anomalies.
This is achieved through global high-resolution numerical integrations of the ECMWF land surface model driven by the downscaled meteorological forcing from the ERA5 climate reanalysis, including an elevation correction for the thermodynamic near-surface state. ERA5-Land shares with ERA5
most of the parameterizations that guarantees the use of the state-of-the-art land surface modelling applied to numerical weather prediction (NWP) models.
A main advantage of ERA5-Land compared to ERA5 and the older ERA-Interim is the horizontal resolution, which is enhanced globally to 9 km compared to 31 km (ERA5) or 80 km (ERA-Interim), whereas the temporal resolution
is hourly as in ERA5. Evaluation against independent in situ observations
and global model or satellite-based reference datasets shows the added value
of ERA5-Land in the description of the hydrological cycle, in particular
with enhanced soil moisture and lake description, and an overall better agreement of
river discharge estimations with available observations. However, ERA5-Land snow depth fields present a mixed performance when compared to those of ERA5, depending on geographical location and altitude.
The description of the
energy cycle shows comparable results with ERA5. Nevertheless, ERA5-Land reduces the global averaged root mean square error of the skin temperature, taking as
reference MODIS data, mainly due to the contribution of
coastal points where spatial resolution is important.
Since January 2020, the ERA5-Land period available has extended from January 1981 to the near present, with a
2- to 3-month delay with respect to real time. The segment prior to 1981 is in production, aiming for a release of the whole dataset in summer/autumn 2021.
The high spatial and temporal resolution of ERA5-Land, its extended period, and the consistency of the fields produced makes it a valuable dataset to support hydrological studies,
to initialize NWP and climate models,
and to support diverse applications dealing with water resource, land, and environmental management. The full ERA5-Land hourly ( Munoz-Sabater ,  2019 a ) and monthly ( Munoz-Sabater ,  2019 b ) averaged datasets presented in this paper are available through the C3S Climate Data Store at https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.e2161bac and https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.68d2bb30 , respectively.

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ERA5-Land: a state-of-the-art global reanalysis dataset for land applications

In situ soil moisture data from more than 200 stations located in Africa, Australia, Europe and the United States are used to determine the reliability of three soil moisture products, one analysis from the ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) numerical weather prediction system (SM-DAS-2) and two remotely sensed soil moisture products, namely ASCAT (Advanced scatterometer) and SMOS (Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity). SM-DAS-2 is produced offline at ECMWF and relies on an advanced surface data assimilation system (Extended Kalman Filter) used to optimally combine conventional observations with satellite measurements. ASCAT remotely sensed surface soil moisture is provided in near real time by EUMETSAT. At ECMWF, ASCAT is used for soil moisture analyses in SM-DAS-2, also. Finally the SMOS remotely sensed soil moisture data level two product developed at CESBIO is used. Evaluation of the times series as well as of the anomaly values, shows good performances of the three products to capture surface soil moisture annual cycle and short term variability. Correlations with in situ data are very satisfactory over most of the investigated sites located in contrasted biomes and climate conditions with averaged values of 0.70 for SM-DAS-2, 0.53 for ASCAT and 0.54 for SMOS. Although radio frequency interference disturbs the natural microwave emission of the Earth observed by SMOS in several parts of the world, hence the soil moisture retrieval, performances of SMOS over Australia are very encouraging.

Evaluation of remotely sensed and modelled soil moisture products using global ground-based in situ observations

The validation of Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) soil moisture products is a crucial step in the investigation of their inaccuracies and limitations, before planning further refinements of the retrieval algorithm. Therefore, this study intended to contribute to the validation of the SMOS soil moisture products, by comparing them with the data collected in situ in the Maqu (China) and Twente (The Netherlands) regions in 2010. The seasonal behavior of the SMOS soil moisture products is generally in agreement with the in situ measurements for both regions. However, the validation analysis resulted in determination coefficients of 0.55 and 0.51 over the Maqu and Twente region, respectively, for the ascending pass data, and of 0.24 and 0.41, respectively, for the descending pass data. Moreover, a systematic dry bias of the SMOS soil moisture was found of approximately 0.13 m3/m3 for the Maqu region and 0.17 m3/m3 for the Twente region for ascending pass data. Several factors might have affected the retrieval accuracy, such as the presence of Radio Frequency Interference (RFI), the use of inaccurate land cover information and the presence of frozen soils not correctly detected in winter. Improving the RFI filtering method and the quality of the retrieval algorithm inputs, such as land surface temperature and land cover, would certainly improve the accuracy of the retrieved soil moisture.

Validation of SMOS Soil Moisture Products over the Maqu and Twente Regions (SCI)

Green water — terrestrial precipitation, evaporation and soil moisture — is fundamental to Earth system dynamics and is now extensively perturbed by human pressures at continental to planetary scales. However, green water lacks explicit consideration in the existing planetary boundaries framework that demarcates a global safe operating space for humanity. In this Perspective, we propose a green water planetary boundary and estimate its current status. The green water planetary boundary can be represented by the percentage of ice-free land area on which root-zone soil moisture deviates from Holocene variability for any month of the year. Provisional estimates of departures from Holocene-like conditions, alongside evidence of widespread deterioration in Earth system functioning, indicate that the green water planetary boundary is already transgressed. Moving forward, research needs to address and account for the role of root-zone soil moisture for Earth system resilience in view of ecohydrological, hydroclimatic and sociohydrological interactions. The planetary boundaries framework outlines a safe operating space for humanity according to key Earth system dynamics. This Perspective proposes the addition of a green water planetary boundary based on root-zone soil moisture and demonstrates that widespread green water modifications now present increasing risks to Earth system resilience. 

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A planetary boundary for green water

A new SMAP soil moisture and vegetation optical depth product (SMAP-IB): Algorithm, assessment and inter-comparison

. In 2009, the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN) was initiated as a community effort, funded by the European Space Agency, to serve as a centralised data hosting facility for globally available in situ soil moisture measurements ( Dorigo et al. ,  2011 b , a ) . The ISMN brings together in situ soil moisture measurements collected and freely shared by a multitude of organisations, harmonises them in terms of units and sampling rates, applies advanced quality control, and stores them in a database. Users can freely retrieve the data from this database through an online web portal ( https://ismn.earth/en/ , last access: 28 October 2021). Meanwhile, the ISMN has evolved into the primary in situ soil moisture reference database worldwide, as evidenced by more than 3000 active users and over 1000 scientific publications referencing the data sets provided by the network. As of July 2021, the ISMN now contains the data of 71 networks and 2842 stations located all over the globe, with a time period spanning from 1952 to the present. The number of networks and stations covered by the ISMN is still growing, and approximately 70 % of the data sets contained in the database continue to be updated on a regular or irregular basis. The main scope of this paper is to inform readers about the evolution of the ISMN over the past decade, including a description of network and data set updates and quality control procedures. A comprehensive review of the existing literature making use of ISMN data is also provided in order to identify current limitations in functionality and data usage and to shape priorities for the next decade of operations of this unique community-based data repository.

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Lukas Schremmer

Papers

The International Soil Moisture Network: Serving Earth system science for over a decade