Real-time high-resolution mapping and monitoring of soil moisture in Tasmania

Soil moisture has various critical roles in agricultural and environmental processes, yet monitoring its real-time spatial variability across a large area is challenging. Here, we assimilated soil moisture models and near-real-time datasets to generate daily soil moisture content prediction across Tasmania at an 80-m resolution. The maps have been embedded in a website for land monitoring since September 2023, with a fully automated mapping procedure to update the published maps within a day. A testing period in September-November 2023 showed that the predicted moisture maps performed well (daily correlation coefficient values varied between 0.60 to 0.75) against 50 observation stations across Tasmania.