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A new, long-term root zone soil moisture dataset for operational agricultural drought monitoring over Africa

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Maidment, R. I. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2054-3259, Quaife, T. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6896-4613, Pinnington, E., Black, E. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1344-6186, Ejigu, A., Kumar, D. and Thomas, S. (2026) A new, long-term root zone soil moisture dataset for operational agricultural drought monitoring over Africa. Scientific Data. ISSN 2052-4463 doi: 10.1038/s41597-026-06585-w (In Press)

Abstract/Summary

Quantifying root zone soil moisture (RZSM) is critical for assessing water availability to crops and identifying agricultural drought across Africa, with access to reliable and timely RZSM data essential for informed decision-making. While rainfall is frequently used to assess crop growing conditions, it alone may not reliably reflect crop water availability due to the impact of evapotranspiration on soil moisture and rainfall not always reflective of concurrent soil water content at rooting depth. To provide robust information on agricultural drought, this paper describes a new, operational RZSM dataset, called TAMSAT soil moisture (TAMSAT-SM), available from 1983-present at 0.25 spatial resolution. TAMSAT-SM is derived using the JULES land surface model, forced with TAMSAT rainfall estimates and other meteorological variables from the NCEP reanalysis, and tuned to SMAP satellite soil moisture observations. Comparison against other RZSM products and independent satellite-derived vegetation health data show TAMSAT-SM can reliably capture the spatial and temporal RZSM and vegetation health patterns across Africa and can be a useful tool to support existing agricultural drought monitoring efforts.

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Item Type Article
URI https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/id/eprint/128132
Identification Number/DOI 10.1038/s41597-026-06585-w
Refereed Yes
Divisions Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO)
Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > NCAS
Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Meteorology
Publisher Nature Publishing Group
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