How wet the topsoil is (WindSat)
What it measures. How wet the very top layer of soil is, along with land surface (skin) temperature and how much water is held in vegetation, measured swath by swath.
How it's made. Derived from the WindSat microwave radiometer on the Coriolis satellite using the Land Parameter Retrieval Model, covering 2003 to 2012.
How & where you'd use it. Useful for drought, agriculture, and land-surface studies; the method's flexibility lets similar readings be drawn from many microwave satellites.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2003-02-01 → 2012-08-01
- Measured byCORIOLIS (WINDSAT)
- Processing levelLevel 2
- Spatial extent-180, -64, 180, 83
- StatusCOMPLETE
What you can do with it
- Map vegetation, forests and biomass
- Monitor ecosystem productivity and carbon
- Support habitat and biodiversity studies
Official description
WindSat/Coriolis surface soil moisture (LPRM) L2 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 polarimetric microwave radiometer data from WindSat, onboard the Naval Research Laboratory's Coriolis satellite, using the Land Parameter Retrieval Model (LPRM). Each swath is packaged with associated geolocation fields. The data set covers the period from February 2003 to July 2012. 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 WindSat's Ka-band (37.0 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 WindSat brightness temperatures (sdrLowRes) product, archived at the Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC).
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="LPRM_WINDSAT_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_DISCBrowsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package. Official links
- Access the data via HTTPS. GET DATA
- GES DISC Hydrology Documentation VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- Use the Earthdata Search to find and retrieve data sets across multiple data centers. GET DATA