Soil Moisture Grids
Soil moisture grids can be downloaded from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology web site: https://awo.bom.gov.au/products/historical/soilMoisture-rootZone. The soil moisture grids can be used a reference to determine antecedent catchment conditions prior to running a forecast.
waterRIDE is setup to read the absolute soil moisture of the root zone. This is expressed as a percentage of "full moisture content". 0% is very dry, whilst 100% is considered saturated.
The raw file can be downloaded from the link above. Select the year you want to download (it will collect available data to date if the current year is selected) and ensure you have chosen absolute in the type field.
During conversion there is an option to append new data to an existing spoil moisture grid (wrr). If using multiple files (eg 2019, 2020 and 2021 years), ensure the older datasets are added first, as the process is sequentially executed.
