In the recent years, the German federal state of Brandenburg has been particularly impacted by soil moisture droughts. To support the timely and informed management of such water-related risks at the state level, we introduced a novel soil moisture monitoring network based on cosmic-ray neutron sensing (CRNS) technology. CRNS has emerged as a promising alternative to point-based sensors as it allows for continuous and non-invasive monitoring of soil moisture with a measurement depth of tens of centimeters ("the root zone") and a footprint area of approximately 10 hectares.That way, CRNS enables robust estimates that are representative at the scale of agricultural fields, hydrotopes, or typical landscape parcels.

The initiative is driven by a joint collaboration of research institutions and federal state agencies. By mid 2024 eight sites were instrumented across Brandenburg; four more are planned for November 2025. This dataset provides the measurements of the CRNS stations from January 2024 until September 2025, as well as the required metadata of the monitoring locations. It also includes soil moisture time series as obtained from the neutron observations, and, for comparison, simulated soil moisture as obtained from the soil hydrological model SWAP, the reanalysis product ERA5-Land, the Copernicus Land Soil Water Index, and the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) surface soil moisture product at the monitoring locations for the same time period.

Please refer to the README.txt in the root directory of the zip-file for further information on the directory structure within the dataset. Furthermore, each subdirectory contains another README for corresponding documentation.

For additional scientific and technical background on the dataset, please refer to the following preprint:

Altdorff, D., Heistermann, M., Francke, T., Schrön, M., Attinger, S., Bauriegel, A., Beyrich, F., Biró, P., Dietrich, P., Eichstädt, R., Grosse, P. M., Markert, A., Terschlüsen, J., Walz, A., Zacharias, S., and Oswald, S. E.: Brief Communication: A new drought monitoring network in the state of Brandenburg (Germany) using cosmic-ray neutron sensing, EGUsphere [preprint], https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-3848, 2024.

This reference will be updated in the future in case a finally revised version of the paper should become available. Please also note that continuous updates of the data are available here: https://cosmic-sense.github.io/brandenburg/de/daten/