Australia wide daily volumetric soil moisture estimates
The Soil Moisture Integration and Prediction System (SMIPS) produces national extent daily estimates of volumetric soil moisture at a resolution of approximately 1km or 0.01 decimal degrees. SMIPS also generates an index of between 0-1 which approximates how full the 90cm metre soil moisture store is at a particular location and time. The SMIPS model itself consists of two linked soil moisture stores, a shallow quick responding 10cm upper store and a deeper, slower responding 80cm store.
SMIPS is parameterised using physical properties from the <a href =' https://esoil.io/TERNLandscapes/Public/Pages/SLGA/index.html '>Soil and Landscape Grid of Australia </a>and takes a data model fusion approach for model forcing. Version 1.0 of the SMIPS model uses precipitation and potential evapotranspiration data from the Bureau of Meteorology’s <a href=" https://awo.bom.gov.au/assets/notes/publications/AWRALv6_Model_Description_Report.pdf ">AWRA Model</a>. In addition to version 1.0 of the model, an experimental version of the model is available for user testing. This version of the model uses precipitation data supplied by an experimental CSIRO daily rainfall surface generated using spatial data from the NASA Global Precipitation Mission as a base and enhanced using rainfall observations from the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) rainfall gauge network, and various landscape covariates, processed using a machine learning approach. <br>
To help increase model accuracy, the internal SMIPS model states are adjusted or ‘bumped’ by daily observational data from the European Space Agency’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite mission.
Simple
Identification info
- Date (Creation)
- 2021-08-25
- Date (Publication)
- 2021-10-20
- Date (Revision)
- 2025-12-10
- Edition
- 1.0
Identifier
Publisher
Author
CSIRO Land and Water (2014-2022) - Stenson, Matt (Team Leader, Environmental Informatics)
147 Underwood Avenue, Floreat, Western Australia, 6014, Australia
Floreat
Western Australia
6014
Australia
Co-author
CSIRO Agriculture and Food - Searle, Ross (Senior Experimental Scientist)
Waite Road, Waite, South Australia, 5064, Australia
Waite
South Australia
5064
Australia
Co-author
CSIRO Agriculture and Food - Malone, Brendan ()
Waite Road, Waite, South Australia, 5064, Australia
Waite
South Australia
5064
Australia
Co-author
CSIRO Land and Water (2014-2022) - Sommer, Ashley ()
147 Underwood Avenue, Floreat, Western Australia, 6014, Australia
Floreat
Western Australia
6014
Australia
Co-author
Australian National University - Renzullo, Luigi (Senior Research Fellow)
10 East Road, Acton, 2601, Australian Capital Territory, Australia
Acton
Australian Capital Territory
2601
Australia
Co-author
Australian National University - Di, He ()
10 East Road, Acton, 2601, Australian Capital Territory, Australia
Acton
Australian Capital Territory
2601
Australia
Contributor
CSIRO Land and Water (2014-2022) - McJannet, David (Principal Research Scientist)
147 Underwood Avenue, Floreat, Western Australia, 6014, Australia
Floreat
Western Australia
6014
Australia
- Website
- https://www.tern.org.au/
- Purpose
- The SMIPS system provides daily estimates of volumetric soil moisture and a soil moisture index to assist with modelling such as crop growth and yield, runoff generation, deep drainage and can be used along with other relevant data for purposes such as fertiliser application planning, irrigation scheduling, fire risk assessments and as a component of a general landscape condition assessment.
- Credit
- We at TERN acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians throughout Australia, New Zealand and all nations. We honour their profound connections to land, water, biodiversity and culture and pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
- Credit
- The development of the SMIPS National Soil Moisture products has been made possible by the National Landcare Program, through the Department of Agriculture and Water Resources, and by TERN, an NCRIS-funded national research infrastructure project. SMIPS model updates and re-factorisation, together with creation of associated digital soil information model inputs performed by CSIRO. Modelling workflow design and model code implementation by CSIRO. The Rainfall forcing and Potential Evapotranspiration data are supplied by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. The Experimental Machine Learning Derived Rainfall data are supplied by CSIRO. The core SMIPS model is adapted from N.S.Wimalathunge and T.F.A.Bishop https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016706118316434 Original SMIPS concept by Luigi Renzullo CSIRO Land and Water (now at Australian National University).
- Status
- On going
Point of contact
CSIRO Agriculture and Food - Malone, Brendan ()
Waite Road, Waite, South Australia, 5064, Australia
Waite Road
Waite
South Australia
5064
Australia
- Topic category
-
- Environment
- Farming
Extent
N
S
E
W
))
Temporal extent
- Time period
- 2015-11-20
- Maintenance and update frequency
- Daily
- GCMD Science Keywords
- ANZSRC Fields of Research
- TERN Parameter Vocabulary
- QUDT Units of Measure
- GCMD Horizontal Resolution Ranges
- GCMD Temporal Resolution Ranges
- Keywords (Discipline)
-
- SMOS
- Australia
- Water Balance
- Raster
- SMIPS
Resource constraints
- Use limitation
- The Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license allows others to copy, distribute, display, and create derivative works provided that they credit the original source and any other nominated parties. Details are provided at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- File name
- 88x31.png
- File description
- CCBy Logo from creativecommons.org
- File type
- png
- Title
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence
- Alternate title
- CC-BY
- Edition
- 4.0
- Access constraints
- License
- Use constraints
- Other restrictions
- Other constraints
- TERN services are provided on an “as-is” and “as available” basis. Users use any TERN services at their discretion and risk. They will be solely responsible for any damage or loss whatsoever that results from such use including use of any data obtained through TERN and any analysis performed using the TERN infrastructure.<br /><br />Web links to and from external, third party websites should not be construed as implying any relationships with and/or endorsement of the external site or its content by TERN.<br /><br />Please advise any work or publications that use this data via the online form at https://www.tern.org.au/research-publications/#reporting
Resource constraints
- Classification
- Unclassified
Distribution Information
- Distribution format
-
Distributor
Distributor
Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network
80 Meiers Road, Indooroopilly, Queensland, 4068, Australia
Indooroopilly
Queensland
4068
Australia
- OnLine resource
- SMIPS Data Portal
- OnLine resource
-
smips
Australia wide daily volumetric soil moisture estimates
- OnLine resource
- Cloud Optimised GeoTIFFs
- OnLine resource
- ro-crate-metadata.json
Data quality info
- Hierarchy level
- Dataset
- Other
- The modelled daily volumetric soil moisture estimates have been validated against a network of 86 publicly available soil moisture probes across Australia, mostly in SE agricultural regions. 76 of these probes are capacitance type probes which typically measure a soil moisture value with a 5cm radius of the probes at 10cm interval down to 1 metre. Ten of the probes were cosmic ray neutron type probes (TERN CosmOz Network: https://cosmoz.csiro.au/) which use neutron counts to estimate soil moisture over an area of approximately 2Ha to a depth ranging from 10 - 40 cm. These Cosmos probes integrate soil moisture measurements at a similar scale to that of the model and thus are well suited to this validation method. The raw probe soil moisture values were converted to volumetric values using automated transformation routines and compared to the modelled values at the same locations to derive a statistical validation.
Report
Result
- Statement
- There are numerous sources of errors in the observed soil moisture values and transformation routines used to estimate volumetric moisture contents, so the validations are at best indicative only. <br> The model had an overall R2 of 0.51. The R2 is the proportion of the variation in the model that can be explained by the values of the soil moisture probe values or degree of correlation between 2 sets of values. It gives an indication of the overall model accuracy. <br> The model had an overall Lin’s Concordance Correlation Coefficient (LCCC) of 0.48. The LCC is a measure of how well the model values compare to the observed data. LCC measures both precision and accuracy with values of -1 to 1, with perfect agreement at 1. LCCC. <br>
Reference System Information
- Reference system identifier
- EPSG/EPSG:4326
- Reference system type
- Geodetic Geographic 2D
Metadata
- Metadata identifier
-
urn:uuid/d1995ee8-53f0-4a7d-91c2-ad5e4a23e5e0
- Title
- TERN GeoNetwork UUID
- Language
- English
- Character encoding
- UTF8
Point of contact
Type of resource
- Resource scope
- Dataset
- Metadata linkage
-
https://geonetwork.tern.org.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/catalog.search#/metadata/d1995ee8-53f0-4a7d-91c2-ad5e4a23e5e0
Point-of-truth metadata URL
- Date info (Creation)
- 2021-08-25T00:00:00.000000+00:00
- Date info (Revision)
- 2025-12-10T10:25:44.653640+00:00
Metadata standard
- Title
- ISO 19115-1:2014/AMD 1:2018 Geographic information - Metadata - Fundamentals
- Edition
- 1
Metadata standard
- Title
- ISO/TS 19115-3:2016
- Edition
- 1.0
Metadata standard
- Title
- ISO/TS 19157-2:2016
- Edition
- 1.0
- Title
- Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) Metadata Profile of ISO 19115-3:2016 and ISO 19157-2:2016
- Date (published)
- 2021
- Edition
- 1.0
Identifier
Overviews
Spatial extent
N
S
E
W
Provided by
Associated resources
Not available