Empirical Standardized Soil Moisture Index For Canadian Prairies

Remotely sensed soil moisture data was used to construct the monthly ESSMI indices across the Canadian Prairies. Datasets used were downloaded from the Climate Data Store (CDS) (Dorigo et al., 2017; Gruber et al., 2017, 2019), which included global estimates of monthly surface soil moisture, derived from an array of satellite sensors. The methodology developed for three distinct soil moisture products - active, passive, and combined - by the European Space Agency (ESA) Climate Change Initiative for Soil Moisture was used to estimate soil moisture for the databases.