Spatial variability of near surface soil moisture in an alpine catchment: application of a wireless network of meteorological stations

Soil moisture is an essential control on hydrological and meteorological behavior and knowledge of its spatial variability is considered to be of high importance for the performance of distributed hydrological models. Few studies have tried to assess the spatial variability of soil moisture in mountainous catchment. Since 2008, an alpine watershed in the Swiss Alps has been intensely monitored with a network of wireless meteorological stations. We present some preliminary results from statistical and geostatistical analysis of the soil moisture dataset. Moreover, we investigate the information content that antecedent soil moisture measurements add to rainfall measurements in order to predict and understand both runoff events and recession flows.