Evaluation of near-realtime weekly root-zone Soil Moisture Index (SMI) for the extreme climate monitoring web-service across East Asia

An extreme climate monitoring is essential to the reduction of socioeconomic damages from extreme events. The objective of this study was to produce the near-realtime weekly root-zone Soil Moisture Index (SMI) on the basis of soil moisture using the Noah 3.3 Land Surface Model (LSM) for potentially monitoring extreme drought events. The Yangtze basin was selected to evaluate the Noah LSM performance for the East Asia region (15-60°N, 70-150°E) and the evapotranspiration (ET) and sensible heat flux (SH) were compared with ET and SH from FluxNet and with ET from FluxCom, Global Land Evaporation Amsterdam Model (GLEAM), ERA-5, and Generalized Complementary Relationship (GCR). For the ET, the coefficients of determination (R²) were higher than 0.96, while the R² value for the SH was 0.71 with slightly lower than those. A time series of the weekly root-zone SMI revealed that the regions with Extreme drought had been expanded from the northern part of East China to the entire East China between July to October 2019. The trend analysis of the number of extreme drought events showed that extreme drought events in spring had reduced in South Korea over the past 20 years, while those in fall had a tendency to increase. It is concluded that this study can be useful to reduce the socioeconomic damages resulted from climate extremes by comprehensively characterizing extreme drought events.