Earth Data School
About
Full catalog/GRACEDADM_CLSM0125US_7D
GRACEDADM_CLSM0125US_7D·v4.0·dataset

Groundwater and soil wetness, weekly US (GRACE, 0.125 deg)

Groundwater and Soil Moisture Conditions from GRACE and GRACE-FO Data Assimilation L4 7-days 0.125 x 0.125 degree U.S. V4.0 (GRACEDADM_CLSM0125US_7D) at GES DISC
atmosphere NASA GES_DISC Level 4 active
In plain English

What it measures. Weekly snapshots of drought conditions across the United States, showing how much water is stored underground and how wet or dry the soil is. The numbers tell you whether groundwater and soil moisture are unusually high or low compared to normal.

How it's made. NASA scientists feed measurements of Earth's total water from the GRACE and GRACE-FO satellites into a detailed computer model of how water moves through the land surface, producing a fine-grained map.

How & where you'd use it. Helps water managers, farmers, and forecasters spot and track droughts, including the kind hiding deep underground that surface measurements miss.

What's measured

CLIMATE INDICATORS › LAND SURFACE/AGRICULTURE INDICATORSCLIMATE INDICATORS › LAND SURFACE/AGRICULTURE INDICATORS › DROUGHT INDICESCLIMATE INDICATORS › LAND SURFACE/AGRICULTURE INDICATORS › SATELLITE SOIL MOISTURE INDEX

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2002-04-01 → ongoing
  • Measured byCatchment-LSM (NOT APPLICABLE)
  • Processing levelLevel 4
  • Spatial extent-125, 25, -67, 53
  • StatusACTIVE

What you can do with it

  • Map air pollutants — NO₂, aerosols, ozone
  • Track greenhouse gases and Earth's energy budget
  • Feed weather and air-quality analysis
Official description

Scientists at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center generate groundwater and soil moisture drought indicators each week. They are based on terrestrial water storage observations derived from GRACE satellite data and integrated with other observations, using a sophisticated numerical model of land surface water and energy processes. This data product is GRACE Data Assimilation for Drought Monitoring (GRACE-DA-DM) U.S. Version 4.0 data product and supersedes the GRACE-DA-DM Version 2.0. The GRACE-DA-DM U.S. V4.0 is based on the Catchment Land Surface Model (CLSM) Fortuna 2.5 version simulation that was created within the Land Information System data assimilation framework (Kumar et al., 2016). This simulation used the latest GRACE RL06 (GRACE; 2002-2017) and GRACE Follow On (GRACE-FO; 2018-present) Mascon solutions version 2, at 0.25 degree resolution, from the University of Texas at Austin (Save et al., 2016; Save, 2020). The CLSM soil parameters were updated to address a soil moisture dry limit issue found near Zapata, Texas. Because the root zone soil moisture frequently reaches the dry limit there, drought conditions are often “normal” when the area should be in drought. The new soil parameters resolved the issue, and the root zone soil moisture now matches closely the in-situ observation near Zapata. In the data assimilation, the baseline for Terrestrial Water Storage anomaly computation was updated to the 2003-2019 mean, whereas previous simulations used the 2003-2016 mean. The percentile computation was switched to a 7-day moving average climatology, instead of monthly, to improve the temporal transition of drought/wetness conditions. The GRACE-DA-DM V1.0 was created by the stand alone CLSM (an older version) using the GRACE-Tellus 1 degree data from the Center for Space Research at University of Texas. The GRACE data assimilation (DA) is executed on a grid-to-grid basis in V2.0, while a basin scale average was used in V1.0 (Zaitchik et al. 2008). The V2.0 data were reprocessed (on June 14, 2017), using the GRACE RL05 Mascon solutions version 1 data set from UT CSR, for the entire period from April 1, 2002 to June 5, 2017. The reprocessing included fixes in the DA and increased the bedrock depth by 3 meters to enhance the drought indicator calculations. The GRACE-DA-DM U.S. V4.0 uses the same configuration as the V2.0 for the DA scheme and increased bedrock depth, with the updates previously mentioned, thus supersedes the previous versions. The GRACE-DA-DM U.S. V4.0 data product contains three drought indicators: Groundwater Percentile, Root Zone Soil Moisture Percentile, and Surface Soil Moisture Percentile. These drought indicators express wet or dry conditions as a percentile, indicating the probability of occurrence within the period of record from 1948 to 2014. The drought indicator data are daily, but available only one day (Monday) per week. The data have a spatial resolution of 0.125 x 0.125 degree over North America and range from April 1, 2002 to present (with a 3-6 months latency). The data are archived in NetCDF format.

Get the data

gracedadm_clsm0125us_7d_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="GRACEDADM_CLSM0125US_7D",
    version="4.0",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from GES_DISC
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.