Reply on RC2

Abstract

Spread across the Twente and neighbouring regions in the east of the Netherlands, a network of 20 profile soil moisture and temperature (5 cm, 10 cm, 20 cm, 40 cm and 80 cm) monitoring stations has been operational since 2009. In addition, field campaigns have been conducted covering the growing seasons of 2009, 2015, 2016 and 2017 during which soil sampling rings and handheld probes were used to measure the soil moisture content of in total 28 fields near 12 different monitoring stations. In this paper, we describe the design of the monitoring network and the field campaigns, adopted instrumentation, experimental setup, field sampling strategies, and the development of sensor calibration functions. The maintenance and quality control procedures, known issues specific to the Twente network, and time series of profile soil moisture and groundwater level for three stations are discussed. Further, an overview is provided of open third-party datasets (i.e. land cover/use, soil information, elevation, groundwater and meteorological observations) that can support the use and analysis of the Twente soil moisture and temperature datasets beyond the scope of this contribution. The data discussed are publicly available at https://doi.org/10.17026/dans-xr2-m6d8 (Van der Velde and Benninga, 2022) under the Creative Commons, CC BY 4.0 license.