A study of field-scale soil moisture variability using the COsmic-ray Soil Moisture Observing System (COSMOS) at IITM Pune site

Abstract

This study presents an analysis of daily field-scale soil-moisture (SM) variations, measured using the COsmic-ray Soil Moisture Observing System (COSMOS), over a tropical monsoon site (IITM, Pune) in India, for the period 2017–2020. Being located in the core zone of the Indian summer monsoon, the daily field-scale SM observations at COSMOS-IITM provide an unique opportunity to understand the SM response to monsoon precipitation variations on sub-seasonal, seasonal and interannual time-scales. In addition to the COSMOS-IITM observations, we also evaluated SM variations over this location using satellite, reanalysis and model products for the same period. An important result from our analysis reveals the presence of biweekly (time-scale ~ 10–20 days) and low-frequency intra-seasonal (time-scale ~ 30–60 days) variations in the field-scale SM, which are linked to the dominant modes of Indian summer monsoon subseasonal variability. In particular, we find a pronounced enhancement of the low-frequency signal of SM variations during the 2019 monsoon which was characterized by abnormally excess precipitation and prolongation of rains well beyond the summer monsoon season, in contrast to 2018 monsoon. Moreover, this study highlights a longer persistence of SM memory time-scale (about 60 days) during 2019 as compared to 2017, 2018 and 2020. The validation of coarser resolution data sets revealed that GLDAS and ERA5 reasonably capture a range of observed field-scale SM variabilities over COSMOS-IITM site.