Soil moisture availability is important in regulating photosynthesis and controlling land surface-climate feedbacks at both the local and global scale. Recently, global remotesensing datasets for soil moisture have become available. In this paper we assess the possibility of using remotely sensed soil moisture (AMSR-E) to evaluate the results of 5 the process-based vegetation model ORCHIDEE during the period 2003-2004. We find that the soil moisture products of AMSR-E and ORCHIDEE correlate

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... , in particular when considering the root zone soil moisture of ORCHIDEE. However, the root zone soil moisture in ORCHIDEE consistently overestimated the temporal autocorrelation relative to AMSR-E and in situ measurements. This may be due to the different ver-10