The effect of diurnal cycle, intermittent visit of observation satellite, sensor installation, partial coverage of remote sensing, heterogeneity of soil properties and precipitation to the soil moisture estimation error were analyzed to present the global sampling strategy of soil moisture. Three models, the theoretical soil moisture model, WGR model proposed Waymire of at. (1984) to generate rainfall, and Turning Band Method to generate two dimensional soil porosity, active soil depth and loss coefficient field were used to construct sufficient two-dimensional soil moisture data based on different scenarios. The sampling error is dominated by sampling interval and design scheme. The effect of heterogeneity of soil properties and rainfall to sampling error is smaller than that of temporal gap and spatial gap. Selecting a small sampling interval can dramatically reduce the sampling error generated by other factors such as heterogeneity of rainfall, soil properties, topography, and climatic conditions. If the annual mean of coverage portion is about 90%, the effect of partial coverage to sampling error can be disregarded. The water retention capacity of fields is very important in the sampling error. The smaller the water retention capacity of the field (small soil porosity and thin active soil depth), the greater the sampling error. These results indicate that the sampling error is very sensitive to water retention capacity. Block random installation gets more accurate data than random installation of soil moisture gages. The Walnut Gulch soil moisture data show that the diurnal variation of soil moisture causes sampling error between 1 and 4 % in daily estimation.