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Full catalog/LPRM_AMSR2_SOILM2
LPRM_AMSR2_SOILM2·v001·dataset

How wet the topsoil is (AMSR2)

AMSR2/GCOM-W1 surface soil moisture (LPRM) L2B V001 (LPRM_AMSR2_SOILM2) at GES DISC
biosphere NASA GES_DISC Level 2 active
In plain English

What it measures. How much water is held in the top layer of soil across the land, along with how warm the ground surface looks and how much water the vegetation is carrying. Readings come strip by strip along the satellite's path.

How it's made. Built from passive microwave signals collected by the AMSR2 instrument on Japan's GCOM-W1 satellite, with a model (LPRM) used to turn the raw microwave brightness into soil moisture figures.

How & where you'd use it. Helpful for tracking droughts, watching how wet farmland is, and feeding weather and climate models that need to know how much moisture the land holds.

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 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, at a spatial resolution (nominally 46 and 31 km, respectively) of AMSR2's C and X bands (6.9/7.3 and 10.7 GHz, respectively). 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_soilm2_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="LPRM_AMSR2_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.