The relevance of the soil moisture content (SMC) for runoff processes and thus for flood prediction is rather undisputed; however, there are still gaps in our knowledge of the precipitation – soil moisture reaction pattern. A new event-based approach, using statistical methods to analyse monitoring data, is presented and applied for soil moisture data of three test sites, situated in different parts of the Tyrolean Alps (Austria). The analyses revealed a significant influence of the initial soil moisture on the remaining soil storage capacity. A comparison of the value pairs initial soil moisture and soil moisture difference (SMCmax caused by rain events minus initial SMC) resulted in funnel-shaped distributions, whereby the upper boundary of the data should roughly match the field capacity of the soils. For purposes of flood prediction, precipitation sums and initial conditions are the relevant variables, while precipitation duration, intensities, and antecedent precipitation have significantly less influence on SMC. However, the functions describing the relationship between precipitation and SMC showed poor model fits despite their significance. Keywords: Soil moisture content ; Flood prediction ; Antecedent precipitation ; Remote sensing ; Alps Highlights; The event-based approach yields statistical functions and quality assessment. The initial soil moisture conditions are crucial to the water storage capacity ; Two parameter models can estimate the in situ water storage capacity of soils. Antecedent precipitation is unsuitable for estimating initial soil moisture content.
