Statistical analysis of soil moisture content changes in Central Europe using GLDAS database over three past decades

Abstract

This paper examine soil moisture trends changes in inhomogeneous area of Central European countries — Poland, the Czech Republic and neighbouring territories. The area suffered from the lack of large-scale soil parameters research. Most of them are limited to ground measurements performed for a small part of land. Although there were extensive water conditions studies performed for the whole Europe, such as drought analysis, they were focused on Western European countries, neglecting situation in Central Europe (taking exception to Austria). The NOAH model of Global Land Data Assimilation System database has been used as a data source. It delivers one degree spatial resolution data and variables which describe soil moisture values for four depth levels (0–10 cm, 10–40 cm, 40–100 cm and 100–200 cm). Data covering years 1979–2011 has been averaged in order to analyse summer and winter terms separately. Descriptive statistics and regression analysis have been prepared on the software Statistica, Research reveals that area is losing water content. Due to promising results of water content trend analysis, the authors plan to run a large-scale analysis using other variables from the GLDAS database, especially concerning soil temperature and evapotranspiration.