The soil moisture initialization experiment is composed of two sets of simulations. The first set consists of one reference simulation (REF) for the period 1995--2008. It's initial states were taken from an earlier spin-up simulation running over several decades. For every year and month, restart data is generated by the model and six hourly averages of the root zone soil moisture and of the soil moisture from individual layers are stored. From these data, extreme wet and dry soil moisture states are extracted as initial conditions for the second set of initialized simulations (INI). The INI are restarted at the start of every season for the years between December 1996 and September 2005, running freely for three years. No INI are started prior to December 1996 as this time is regarded as additional spin-up for the model to adapt to minor differences in the forcing between the REF and the spin-up simulation. Thus, this experiment yields ensembles consisting of 9 members (one for each year) per restart month (4) and initialization state (2), respectively, accumulating to 9 x 4 x 2 simulations resulting in a dataset of 216 simulation years. The full study is published here: Stacke, T. and Hagemann, S.: Lifetime of soil moisture perturbations in a coupled land-atmosphere simulation, Earth Syst. Dynam., 7, 1-19, doi:10.5194/esd-7-1-2016, 2016.