Earth Data School
About
Full catalog/LPRM_AMSR2_DS_SOILM2
LPRM_AMSR2_DS_SOILM2·v001·dataset

How wet the soil is, sharpened (AMSR-2)

AMSR2/GCOM-W1 downscaled surface soil moisture (LPRM) L2B V001 (LPRM_AMSR2_DS_SOILM2) at GES DISC
biosphere NASA GES_DISC Level 2 active
In plain English

What it measures. How wet the surface soil is, along with the land's skin temperature and how much water is held in vegetation, swath by swath across the globe.

How it's made. Derived from the AMSR2 microwave instrument on Japan's GCOM-W1 satellite using a retrieval model, then sharpened from its native coarse resolution down to roughly 10 km grids.

How & where you'd use it. Supports drought tracking, farming, flood forecasting, and water-cycle research where finer-detail soil moisture is helpful.

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 span2012-07-02 → ongoing
  • Measured byGCOM-W1 (AMSR2)
  • Processing levelLevel 2
  • 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 downscaled surface soil moisture (LPRM) L2B V001 is a Level 2 (swath) 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). Each swath is packaged with associated geolocation fields. 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 spatial resolution of the data is based on a resampling of the nominally 46 and 31 km resolutions, respectively, of AMSR2's C and X bands (6.9/7.3 and 10.7 GHz, respectively) to 25 km by 25 km and then a downscaling, using the smoothing filter-based intensity modulation (SFIM) technique, to 10 km by 10 km grids. 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, archived at JAXA.

Get the data

lprm_amsr2_ds_soilm2_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="LPRM_AMSR2_DS_SOILM2",
    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.