The Texas Soil Observation Network:A Comprehensive Soil Moisture Dataset for Remote Sensing and Land Surface Model Validation

Abstract

The spatiotemporal variability of soil water content (SWC) at the remote sensing scale requires dense monitoring for calibration and validation. Here, we present an overview of the Texas Soil Observation Network (TxSON), an intensively monitored area in the semiarid rangelands of the central Texas Hill Country. TxSON is a dense network consisting of 40 in situ locations nested at 36, 9, and 3 km within the Equal‐Area Scalable Earth Grid and serves as a Core Calibration and Validation Site for NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive mission. The 4‐yr dataset consists of hourly SWC measured at 5, 10, 20, and 50 cm. The SWC data are upscaled using arithmetic, Voronoi, and inverse distance weighting for 36‐, (2) 9‐, and (5) 3‐km grid cells. We present the site selection, environmental characteristics, network design, quality assurance (QA), upscaling algorithms, and data structure. Ancillary data include bulk density, particle size, and carbon content for each site and depth. We also provide automated QA for each location and scripts to use our binary flagging in upscaling methods. To summarize, the 36‐km grid cell has a mean bulk density of 1.34 ± 0.18 g cm−3 and a loam textural class. The in situ SWC has a root mean square error of 0.029 m3 m−3 against gravimetric data from 14 field campaigns. TxSON continues to add new locations with additional dense networks planned in other ecotones of the Edwards Plateau.