Daily worldwide soil moisture (Copernicus) — clms_swi_global_12.5km_daily_v3

In plain English

What it measures. Provides daily readings of how moist the soil is across several layers, from the surface down, everywhere on the globe.

How it's made. ESA Copernicus derives it from the ASCAT instrument on the Metop satellites at 12.5-kilometre resolution, covering January 2007 to 2025.

How & where you'd use it. Helps with day-to-day drought monitoring, agricultural planning, and tracking how wet or dry land surfaces are worldwide.

What's measured

CopernicusCLMSSWISoil Water Indexsoil moistureglobaldaily12.5kmMetopASCAT

Coverage & cadence

Time span2006-12-31 → 2025-07-14
Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
FormatsCOG, NetCDF

What you can do with it

Follow rainfall, floods and surface-water extent
Track soil moisture and the onset of drought
Monitor lakes, rivers and groundwater storage

Official description

Provides daily updates on the moisture conditions in different soil layers. The data are available over the globe at the spatial resolution of 12.5 km and with the temporal extent from January 2007 to 2025.

Get the data

copernicus_access.py

# ESA Copernicus Data Space — open STAC API (free account)
from pystac_client import Client

cat = Client.open("https://stac.dataspace.copernicus.eu/v1")
search = cat.search(
    collections=["clms_swi_global_12.5km_daily_v3"],   # add _cog or _nc for a format variant
    bbox=(-10, 35, 30, 60),             # your area (W,S,E,N)
    datetime="2024-01-01/2024-12-31",
)
items = list(search.items())            # then read assets with rioxarray / xarray

Browsing the Copernicus STAC is open; downloading bytes needs a free Copernicus Data Space account.

Official links

Open data source Copernicus STAC