Soil moisture data of 45 years from European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Re-Analysis (ERA-40) and the in situ observational data are used to study the temporal and spatial characteristics of the soil moisture in boreal spring in the area to the east of 100°E in China. Results show that ERA-40 soil moisture well reproduces the temporal and spatial features of observations. ERA-40 data capture the spatial pattern that the soils in Northeast China and Southwest China are wetter than those in Inner Mongolia and North China and represent the inter-annual variability in ob-servations. The dry trends of spring soil moisture are evident over the whole eastern China. It is espe-cially prominent for the dry trend in southwest China where the spring soil from surface to deep-layer show drying and the trend became significant after the 1980s. The dry trend in Northeast China is weak after early 1970s in near-surface layer but aggravates after latel 1970s in deep layers. In the mid-latitude zone, the inter-annual variation of spring soil is robust and shows no dry trend except in deep-layer after 1988.
