Doubt about depth in soil moisture outputs

[fmanquehual]

Hello everyone, I hope you are very well.

I want to evaluate SMAP soil moisture (from Google Engine) with mHM outputs, but I'm not really clear with the interpretation about some outputs of mHM. For example, among all variables, SMAP has soil moisture volume fraction for "surface zone" (0-5 cm) and "root zone" (0-100 cm) and I'm not sure what is the correct depth to "SM_L01" and "SM_Lall" outputs from mHM.

So, my question is ¿What is the corresponding depth (e.g., 0-5, 0-100) and units (mm or cm) for the "SM_L01" and "SM_Lall" variables?

Best regards,
Francisco.

[pallavhydro]

Hi Francisco

Thanks for reaching out. Great question. The comparison depends on your mHM model's soil layer setup.

In the mhm.nml namelist (control) file, you should see the number of soil layers opted for the setup and the depth that they represent. Of course, there should also exist the corresponding soil maps for the layers in the morph directory.

At times, it could well be that the soil data layers do not correspond exactly to the data you want to compare with. E.g., the soil input data layers for the model are, say, 0-7 mm, 7-50 mm, 50-100 mm, ... and you want to compare with SMAP's surface zone soil moisture of 0-5 mm. In this case, a possibility (and assumption!) would be to use the first layer of your model for comparison.

Cheers
Pallav

[fmanquehual]

Perfect, thank you so much Pallav.