How to set initial soil moisture condition

[BryanSouzaM]

Hey to all!

I was readind the article Predictions in a data-sparse region using a regionalized grid-based hydrologic model driven by remotely sensed data by Luis Samaniego, Rohini Kumar and Conrad Jackisch and as my goal is also to run the model with remotely sensed data only, I saw that the authors used initial soil moisture conditions. But checking the manual and configuration files, I didn't see anything about it.

Doubts:
How is this done?
Is it useful to use remotely sensed soil moisture data to set initial conditions?

ty !

Cheers
Bryan

[rohinikumar82]

Hi @BryanSouzaM,

You can use the functionality of restart option and then adjust/specify the initial soil moisture values in the restart.nc file.

Is it useful to use remotely sensed soil moisture data to set initial conditions?

• It very much depends on values you get and your research investigation.
• Note that in the paper you mention - we did not use initial soil moisture conditions from remote sensing datasets, but I guess it was investigation to see the sensitivity of model output to initial conditions.
• Also I guess there will be limitation of using remote sensing based SM in mHM: uncertainty and errors in RS data as well how to use them for deeper layers?

Best,
Rohini