In the context of evaluating the occurrence of drought events over Europe, soil moisture maps provide an
invaluable resource to quantify the effects of rainfall deficits on vegetated lands. Spatially distributed
models represent one of the main options, alongside satellite remote sensing, to successfully monitor this
quantity over large areas in a cost effective way. This work has the double aim of: (i) intercomparing
three soil moisture outputs obtained by different land-surface models (LISFOOD, CLM and TESSEL)
through long (at least 6 years of data between 2001 and 2011) in-situ measured datastreams, and (ii)
quantifying the added value of combining the estimates of these three models by means of a simple
ensemble approach. Generally, the three models return similar soil moisture anomalies over most of
Europe, with few notable exceptions during summer in Mediterranean regions. The comparison with
in-situ data suggests no substantial differences among the models, with LISFLOOD slightly outperforming
the other two in terms of correlation as also supported by a pairwise comparison. The combined soil
moisture anomalies obtained via the ensemble-mean approach are characterized by an increase of both
the correlation and the accuracy in retrieving extreme events compared to the single models; however,
the number of observed extreme events actually captured by the ensemble model does not increase sig-
nificantly if compared to the single models. Overall, the ensemble model results are skillful, with an all
site average skill score of about 0.4.
2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND
license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).