Dear Will,

You are right. The soil moisture field is the evolved field initialized very crudely in 1996, when we set profiles to be linearly interpolated between saturation at the bottom of the soil domain and the climatological moisture evailability times saturation at the surface. Since 1996 the soil moisture field feeded by 1-h forecast of precipitation, was evolving to much more realistic values. Cycling was also applied to soil temperature field, and validations of these two fields against available in-situ observations were very encouraging.
The cycling of soil variables was also tested off-line in 1-D experiments using multi-year simulations for Valdai, Russia. In these experiments the soil variables forced by observed atmospheric forcing were evolving for 19 years, and were verified against observed values. The results of these verifications are described in Schlosser, C. A., et al., 1999. Simulations of a boreal grassland hydrology at Valdai, Russia: PILPS Phase 2(d), Mon. Weather Rev., Vol. 128, No. 2, 301-321. They are also presented in papers by Smirnova et al., listed on our Web site.
If you have more question, please, let me know.

Sincerely,
 Tanya