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Full catalog/LPRM_AMSRE_A_SOILM3
LPRM_AMSRE_A_SOILM3·v002·dataset

How wet the soil is (AMSR-E, daily, 25 km)

AMSR-E/Aqua surface soil moisture (LPRM) L3 1 day 25 km x 25 km ascending V002 (LPRM_AMSRE_A_SOILM3) at GES DISC
biosphere NASA GES_DISC Level 3
In plain English

What it measures. This estimates how wet the top layer of soil is across the globe, along with land surface skin temperature and how much water is held in vegetation, on a daily 25 km grid. This file covers the daytime (ascending) passes.

How it's made. It is derived from passive microwave readings by the AMSR-E instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite, run through a model that turns the raw signal into soil moisture and related measures. It spans June 2002 to October 2011, when the instrument stopped working.

How & where you'd use it. Useful for drought monitoring, agriculture, and understanding how water moves through the landscape, and for studying past conditions during its 2002-2011 window.

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 span2002-06-19 → 2011-10-03
  • Measured byAqua (AMSR-E)
  • Processing levelLevel 3
  • Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
  • StatusCOMPLETE

What you can do with it

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

AMSR-E/Aqua surface soil moisture (LPRM) L3 1 day 25 km x 25 km ascending V002 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-Earth Observing System (AMSR-E), 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 daytime product. The data set covers the period from June 2002 to October 2011 (when the AMSR-E on the NASA EOS Aqua satellite stopped producing data due to a problem with the rotation of its antenna). 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 AMSR-E'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 AMSR-E resampled brightness temperatures (AE_L2A) product, daytime passes, as processed using LPRM (i.e., LPRM/AMSR-E/Aqua L2B product, LPRM_AMSRE_SOILM2_V002).

Get the data

lprm_amsre_a_soilm3_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="LPRM_AMSRE_A_SOILM3",
    version="002",
    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.