Grid-to-Grid daily simulated soil moisture 1964-2018, at selected UK Soil Moisture Databank sites.

This dataset contains Grid-to-Grid (G2G) daily simulated soil moisture time-series at selected UK Soil Moisture Databank (UKSMD) sites. It was created to facilitate an evaluation of G2G simulated soil moisture against the UKSMD neutron probe soil moisture observations (Bell et al., 2022). 

G2G (Bell et al., 2009) is a national-scale gridded hydrological model, which has been widely applied to simulate river flows and more recently soil moisture. Here, the model was run at 1km resolution from 01/01/1964 - 16/12/2019 across Great Britain. Simulated soil moisture time-series are provided for the 1km grid-cells closest to selected UKSMD site locations. The G2G simulates vertically-integrated soil moisture in units of mm/m. For further explanation of G2G soil moisture, please see Kay et al., 2022 (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac7a4e).  

The data is provided as two plain text files:

1) g2g_soilmoist_1964_2018.txt contains the simulated soil moisture values. The first three columns specify the simulation date (day, month, year). Subsequent columns are soil moisture (mm/m) time-series at each site, with the UKSMD site ID given as column headers. 

2) site_locations.csv contains the locations of the UKSMD sites. In some cases there were multiple tubes with slightly different locations within a larger site, and here we are providing the location of the specific tube used. Columns specify: SITE_NAME (the site ID), TUBE_NAME (the tube number), EASTING and NORTHING (easting and northing in British National Grid). The site ID and tube names used in this document are consistent with the UKSMD documentation. 

References:

Bell, V. A., Kay, A. L., Jones, R. G., Moore, R. J., & Reynard, N. S. (2009). Use of soil data in a grid-based hydrological model to estimate spatial variation in changing flood risk across the UK. Journal of Hydrology, 377(3-4), 335-350.

Bell, V.A.; Davies, H.N.; Fry, M.; Zhang, T.; Murphy, H.; Hitt, O.; Hewitt, E.J.; Chapman, R.; Black, K.B. (2022). Collated neutron probe measurements and derived soil moisture data, UK, 1966-2013. NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre. https://doi.org/10.5285/450bb14b-c711-47af-8792-f9bd88482cd4

Kay, A. L., Lane, R. A., & Bell, V. A. (2022). Grid-based simulation of soil moisture in the UK: future changes in extremes and wetting and drying dates. Environmental Research Letters, 17(7), 074029.