A land surface model driven by the continuous three-year observed meteorological data with a time interval of 30 minutes at the Tongyu station, a reference site of the Coordinated Enhanced Observing Period (CEOP), was used to evaluate the observation bias of soil moisture (SM) data and analyze the variation of SM at diffierent time scales. The saline-alkaline soil of the grassland at the Tongyu site makes the measured SM too high, especially in boreal summer of 2003–05. The simulated annual mean SM has the lowest value in 2004 and its three-year variation corresponds to the change of precipitation, whereas the observation shows the increasing trend from 2003 to 2005. Compared to the variation range between -60% and 40% for the anomaly percentage of the simulated daily mean SM during May–October of 2004, the measured data show the higher values more than 40%. The magnitude of the variation trend of the observed daily mean SM in 2003 and 2005 is generally consistent with the simulation. The largest deficiency for the soil moisture observation of the grassland is the overestimated value in the drought year with less precipitation. The simulated monthly mean SM has the lowest value in March due to the large contribution of evaporation relative to precipitation and this phenomenon can not be reproduced in the observation.
