Upper Missouri River Basin Soil Moisture and Snowpack Dashboard
NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) and National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), Montana Mesonet, Nebraska Mesonet, Mesonet at South Dakota State University, North Dakota Agricultural Weather Network (NDAWN), Wyoming Mesonet, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
Note: The content and functionality of this dashboard are for demonstration purposes only and are not finalized, including some simulated data. Please read all map descriptions carefully.
Under Congressional direction, NOAA's National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) is leading the Upper Missouri River Basin Data Value Study, an interagency study of the value of the data from the Upper Missouri River Basin Soil Moisture and Plains Snow Monitoring Build-Out to support improvements to water resource models, drought monitoring capabilities, and other applications. One goal of this study is to produce publicly-available, basin-wide soil moisture and snowpack data and maps on Drought.gov to support the U.S. Drought Monitor authors and contributors.
To facilitate access to the diverse datasets necessary to fully monitor basin-wide hydrological conditions, the U.S. Drought Portal team created an interactive dashboard. The Drought Portal team ingests station-based soil moisture and snowpack data from the five state mesonets in the Upper Missouri River Basin (UMRB)—Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. Data are ingested via Synoptic, who is contracted by the National Weather Service’s National Mesonet Program to develop the UMRB data access platform. Soil moisture and snowpack data are valid through 12z each Tuesday, and are displayed in actionable maps. Overlays, such as the U.S. Drought Monitor or snow water equivalent (SWE), are also available to provide additional context to station-level observations that inform drought monitoring and decision-making in the region.
Available maps include:
- Soil moisture (volumetric water content) change maps for 1, 4, 8, and 12 weeks, which can show important trends in evolving conditions
- Topsoil: Average of 2- and 4-inch depth observations
- Subsoil: Average of 8- and 20-inch depth observations
- Total Column: Average of 2-, 4-, 8-, and 20-inch depth observations
- Snow depth current conditions (inches).
Additional maps, such as fractional available water (FAW), snow water equivalent (SWE), and categorical soil moisture, are planned for future phases of development. Because of the current short period of record for this new network, VWC anomalies or percentiles are not yet available.
For additional soil moisture and snowpack data and information, visit the five UMRB state mesonets, or view time series graphs of the data on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers UMRB Monitoring Network page.
Access
UMRB Soil Moisture & Snowpack Dashboard
UMRB Monitoring Network Data: View and download time series graphs of soil moisture and snow data, as well as photos of the mesonet stations.
View soil moisture and snowpack data from the UMRB state mesonets:
Soil Moisture Change Map Methodology
Weekly changes in soil moisture conditions provide one of the most straightforward measures of evolving or trending hydrological conditions. To represent a variety of short- to long-term conditions, weekly changes in volumetric water content (VWC) are represented in units of m3/m3 for topsoil (2-inch and 4-inch depth observations), subsoil (8-inch and 20-inch depth observations), and column (2-, 4-, 8-, and 20-inch depth observations). Differences are computed as the most recent Tuesday at 12Z minus Tuesday at 12Z X weeks ago.
Computing Change Maps with Frozen Soils
The type of soil moisture sensors deployed across the Upper Missouri River Basin and at most monitoring networks are not well suited to quantify ice water content, which complicates efforts to derive soil moisture change around the winter season. However, ice water content is generally unaffected by hydrological processes (i.e., gravitation drainage, lateral or downhill flow, or evapotranspiration) such that it can be well approximated by liquid water content immediately following pre-freeze. A general consensus based on feedback from soil scientists and leading experts in this field has identified that soil temperatures at or above 2°C have near negligible ice water content. Given the stasis of ice water content, it is reasonable to compute a soil moisture change when one or both ends of the change period are in a frozen condition by substituting the most recent unfrozen (soil temperature > 2°C) soil moisture observation. Stations with shifted dates due to frozen soil conditions are denoted with a triangle on the soil moisture change maps.
Soil Moisture Change Plots:
To compute soil moisture change, valid observations of both soil moisture and temperature are necessary. Differences are to be computed at each depth individually as current Tuesday at 12Z (SMcurrent) minus starting Tuesday at 12Z X-weeks ago (SMx-weeks). For instance, a 4-week soil moisture change is SMcurrent minus SM4-weeks (Fig 1a). Soil moisture change at each depth is then averaged over the respective layer's (i.e., top, subsoil, column) depths.
To derive a soil moisture change for a period, set i to the current Tuesday at 12Z representing SMcurrent.
- If soil temperature at week i (STi) is missing then set SMcurrent to missing.
- If soil moisture at week i (SMi) is missing and STi ≥ 2°C, then set SMcurrent to missing.
- If STi > 2°C then set SMcurrent to SMi.
- If STi is less than < 2°C then set i to the previous week (i-1) and repeat this process until one finds an observation week in the past where STi > 2°C. Then, set SMcurrent to SMi
This same process will be used to define SMx-weeks with i initially set to the respective Tuesday at 12Z X-weeks ago.
In this way, changes in soil moisture that temporally include frozen soils represent the liquid water content change over that period (Fig. 1). For a 4-week change map, SMcurrent and SM4-week will represent soil moisture conditions based on soil temperature for Fig. 1.
- When STcurrent ≥ 2°C and STx-weeks ≥ 2°C (outside of frozen period), SMcurrent and SM4-week represented the soil moisture conditions for the current Tuesday and Tuesday 4 weeks ago at 12Z (Fig. 1a). SMChange = SMcurrent – SM4-weeks
- When STcurrent < 2°C and ST4-weeks ≥ 2°C (going into a frozen period) SMcurrent will be set to the soil moisture value on the Tuesday at 12Z denoted by L (SML) as noted in (Fig. 1b).
- When STcurrent < 2°C and ST4-weeks < 2°C (contained in frozen period) SMcurrent and SMx-weeks are both set to the Tuesday at 12Z denoted by L` (SML`), which represents no change (Fig. 1c).
- When STcurrent ≥ 2°C and STx-weeks < 2°C (emerging from frozen period), SM4-weeks is set to the Tuesday at 12Z denoted by L` (SML`) as shown in Fig. 1d.
