An experimental break-adjusted soil-moisture product has been generated by the ESA Soil Moisture Climate Change Initiative (Soil_Moisture_cci) project for the first time with their v06.1 data release. The product attempts to reduce breaks in the final CCI product by matching the statistics of the datasets between merging periods. At v06.1, the break-adjustment process (explained in Preimesberger et al. 2020) is applied only to the COMBINED product, using ERA5 soil moisture as a reference. The Soil Moisture CCI COMBINED dataset is one of three datasets created as part of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Soil Moisture Essential Climate Variable (ECV) Climate Change Initiative (CCI) project. The product has been created by directly merging Level 2 scatterometer and radiometer soil moisture products derived from the AMI-WS, ASCAT, SMMR, SSM/I, TMI, AMSR-E, WindSat, AMSR2, SMOS, SMAP, FY-3B and GPM satellite instruments. PASSIVE and ACTIVE products have also been created.

The v06.1 COMBINED break-adjusted product, provided as global daily images in NetCDF-4 classic file format, presents a global coverage of surface soil moisture at a spatial resolution of 0.25 degrees. It is provided in volumetric units [m3 m-3] and covers the period (yyyy-mm-dd) 1978-11-01 to 2020-12-31. For information regarding the theoretical and algorithmic base of the product, please see the Algorithm Theoretical Baseline Document and Preimesberger et al. 2020. Additional reference documents and information relating to the dataset can also be found on the CCI Soil Moisture project website.

The data set should be cited using all of the following references:

1. Gruber, A., Scanlon, T., van der Schalie, R., Wagner, W., and Dorigo, W. (2019). Evolution of the ESA CCI Soil Moisture climate data records and their underlying merging methodology, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 11, 717–739, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-11-717-2019

2. Dorigo, W.A., Wagner, W., Albergel, C., Albrecht, F., Balsamo, G., Brocca, L., Chung, D., Ertl, M., Forkel, M., Gruber, A., Haas, E., Hamer, D. P. Hirschi, M., Ikonen, J., De Jeu, R. Kidd, R. Lahoz, W., Liu, Y.Y., Miralles, D., Lecomte, P. (2017). ESA CCI Soil Moisture for improved Earth system understanding: State-of-the art and future directions. In Remote Sensing of Environment, 2017, ISSN 0034-4257, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2017.07.001

3. Preimesberger, W., Scanlon, T., Su, C. -H., Gruber, A. and Dorigo, W., "Homogenization of Structural Breaks in the Global ESA CCI Soil Moisture Multisatellite Climate Data Record," in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, vol. 59, no. 4, pp. 2845-2862, April 2021, doi: 10.1109/TGRS.2020.3012896.