Spatial‐temporal variability of soil moisture and its estimation across scales

The soil moisture is a quantity of paramount importance in the study of hydrologic phenomena and soil‐atmosphere interaction. Because of its high spatial and temporal variability, the soil moisture monitoring scheme was investigated here both for soil moisture retrieval by remote sensing and in view of the use of soil moisture data in rainfall‐runoff modeling. To this end, by using a portable Time Domain Reflectometer, a sequence of 35 measurement days were carried out within a single year in seven fields located inside the Vallaccia catchment, central Italy, with area of 60 km 2 . Every sampling day, soil moisture measurements were collected at each field over a regular grid with an extension of 2000 m 2 . The optimization of the monitoring scheme, with the aim of an accurate mean soil moisture estimation at the field and catchment scale, was addressed by the statistical and the temporal stability. At the field scale, the number of required samples (NRS) to estimate the field‐mean soil moisture within an accuracy of 2%, necessary for the validation of remotely sensed soil moisture, ranged between 4 and 15 for almost dry conditions (the worst case); at the catchment scale, this number increased to nearly 40 and it refers to almost wet conditions. On the other hand, to estimate the mean soil moisture temporal pattern, useful for rainfall‐runoff modeling, the NRS was found to be lower. In fact, at the catchment scale only 10 measurements collected in the most “representative” field, previously determined through the temporal stability analysis, can reproduce the catchment‐mean soil moisture with a determination coefficient, R 2 , higher than 0.96 and a root‐mean‐square error, RMSE, equal to 2.38%. For the “nonrepresentative” fields the accuracy in terms of RMSE decreased, but similar R 2 coefficients were found. This insight can be exploited for the sampling in a generic field when it is sufficient to know an index of soil moisture temporal pattern to be incorporated in conceptual rainfall‐runoff models. The obtained results can address the soil moisture monitoring network design from which a reliable soil moisture temporal pattern at the catchment scale can be derived.