Soil Moisture Data Quality Guidance

The Soil Moisture Data Quality Guidance document provides guidelines for standardizing soil moisture data collection by mesonets and other long-term monitoring networks. It introduces a tiering system for categorizing soil moisture data into "data quality tiers" and provides aspirational goals to improve the quality of soil moisture data. 

The approach described in this document for categorizing networks into three tiers parallels a proposed tiering method for meteorological networks more broadly, as described by the World Meteorological Organization's Global Climate Observing System. However, this document differs from this approach in that it is designed to specifically address challenges and needs associated with long-term soil moisture monitoring. 

The document is designed to be used for self-assessment by monitoring networks and is intended to create greater transparency with respect to the quality of data for users of soil moisture data. This data quality guidance document is a companion to the Soil Moisture Metadata Guidance document and is part of a series of resources on long-term soil moisture monitoring that are being produced by the National Coordinated Soil Moisture Monitoring Network to standardize long-term soil moisture measurements.