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Soil moisture (SM) is a significant component of climatological, hydrological and ecological systems. It has long been recognised as a key state variable of the global energy and water cycle due to its control on exchanges of energy and matter and physical processes. Thus, information on its variation over time and space domains is of key importance to both practitioners and researchers alike from a variety of disciplines. There is a breadth of options that can be considered for deriving estimates of SM, one of which is the use of ground instrumentation. In view of the requirement for information on the spatial distribution of SM, ground-based observational networks have also been developed worldwide, providing SM data operationally, and at no cost to the user's community globally. Such data is also pivotal in studies concerned with benchmarking related Earth Observation-based datasets, since ground …