Swiss Soil Moisture EXperiment (SwissSMEX)

Soil moisture is a key variable of the climate system, which is not only relevant for agriculture but also for meteorological and seasonal forecasting. In particular, knowledge on soil moisture evolution and its interaction with the atmosphere can help understand processes leading to extreme events such as droughts, heatwaves, and heavy precipitation. This is particularly relevant in the context of climate change, with changes in soil moisture being projected to enhance (and in some case reduce) impacts from enhanced greenhouse gas concentrations. Despite its importance, soil moisture is not routinely measured in most parts of the world, particularly in Europe, where measurement datasets are scarce.

Since June 2008, the joint project SwissSMEX (Swiss Soil Moisture EXperiment) has been initiated by ETH Zurich, Agroscope ART, and MeteoSwiss to address this issue. In 2010 the additional project SwissSMEX-Veg was established, in order to investigate soil moisture evolution at sites with different land cover types (forest vs grassland). Both projects were funded by the external pageSwiss National Foundation. This allowed the establishment of a three-year (2008-2011) soil moisture measurement experiment to provide a comprehensive assessment of soil moisture and its interaction with climate in Switzerland. At present, measurements are still on-going, and the network consists of 19 sites at 17 locations (14 grassland, 1 arable, and 4 forest stations), including the Rietholzbach research catchment site, several external pageSwissFluxnet sites, and selected external pageSwissMetNet stations.

Current status

Contacts

Coordination: Prof. Sonia I. Seneviratne

Database: Dr. Martin Hirschi

Technical support: Dr. Dominik Michel

Technical support/maintenance: Dr. Michael Rösch

Objectives

The aim of this research project is to set up a soil moisture measurement network in Switzerland, and to investigate soil moisture-climate interactions using the collected data. The main objectives include:

  • The assessment of the spatial variability of soil moisture at the sites and the determination of characteristic spatial scales for intra- and inter-sites variability
  • The assessment of the temporal variability of soil moisture at the sites and its link with the main climate drivers (radiation, precipitation)
  • The investigation of soil moisture-vegetation-climate dynamics for different land cover
  • The determination of the impact of soil moisture for local and regional climate (feedbacks) and of its potential for weather and seasonal forecasting in Switzerland
  • The investigation of regionalization approaches
  • The evaluation of indirect soil moisture observation techniques and approaches (BSWB dataset; satellite measurements)
  • The validation of land surface and climate models with regard to soil moisture representation in Central Europe

Reference publication

Mittelbach, H., and S.I. Seneviratne, 2012: external pageA new perspective on the spatio-temporal variability of soil moisture: temporal dynamics versus time-invariant contributions. Hydr. Earth Syst. Sci, 16, 2169–2179, doi:10.5194/hess-16-2169-2012.

More publications related to SwissSMEX are listed here.

Links

Sites

Set up of a SwissSMEX site

Site instrumentation

Available data

Publications

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