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Full catalog/LPRM_AMSR2_D_SOILM3
LPRM_AMSR2_D_SOILM3·v001·dataset

How wet the soil is (AMSR2, daily, 25 km)

AMSR2/GCOM-W1 surface soil moisture (LPRM) L3 1 day 25 km x 25 km descending V001 (LPRM_AMSR2_D_SOILM3) at GES DISC
biosphere NASA GES_DISC Level 3 active
In plain English

What it measures. Daily nighttime maps of how wet the soil is near the land surface, along with land surface temperature and the amount of water held in vegetation.

How it's made. Derived from microwave measurements by the AMSR2 instrument on Japan's GCOM-W1 satellite, gridded globally at 25 km using the Land Parameter Retrieval Model, with a separate file for the nighttime (descending) passes.

How & where you'd use it. Useful for monitoring droughts, water availability, and farming conditions, and for studying how moisture moves between land and atmosphere.

What's measured

BIOSPHERE › VEGETATION › PLANT CHARACTERISTICS › VEGETATION WATER CONTENTLAND SURFACE › SOILS › SOIL MOISTURE/WATER CONTENTLAND SURFACE › SURFACE THERMAL PROPERTIES › SKIN TEMPERATURE

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2012-07-03 → ongoing
  • Measured byGCOM-W1 (AMSR2)
  • Processing levelLevel 3
  • Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
  • StatusACTIVE

What you can do with it

  • Map vegetation, forests and biomass
  • Monitor ecosystem productivity and carbon
  • Support habitat and biodiversity studies
Official description

AMSR2/GCOM-W1 surface soil moisture (LPRM) L3 1 day 25 km x 25 km descending V001 is a Level 3 (gridded) data set. Its land surface parameters, surface soil moisture, land surface (skin) temperature, and vegetation water content, are derived from passive microwave remote sensing data from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2), using the Land Parameter Retrieval Model (LPRM). There are two files per day, one ascending (daytime) and one descending (nighttime), archived as two different products. This document is for the nighttime product. The data set covers the period from May 2012, when the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Global Change Observation Mission-1st Water GCOM-W1 satellite was launched, to the present. The LPRM is based on a forward radiative transfer model to retrieve surface soil moisture and vegetation optical depth. The land surface temperature is derived separately from the AMSR2's Ka-band (36.5 GHz). A unique feature of this method is that it can be applied at any microwave frequency, making it very suitable to exploit all the available passive microwave data from various satellites. Input data are from the AMSR2 spatial-resolution-matched brightness temperatures (L1SGRTBR) product, nighttime passes, as processed using LPRM (i.e., LPRM/AMSR2/GCOM-W1 Level 2 product, LPRM_AMSR2_SOILM2_V001).

Get the data

lprm_amsr2_d_soilm3_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="LPRM_AMSR2_D_SOILM3",
    version="001",
    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.