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Full catalog/NASMo_TiAM_250m_2326
NASMo_TiAM_250m_2326·v1·dataset

How wet North American soil is (250 m, 16-day)

NASMo-TiAM 250m 16-day North America Surface Soil Moisture Dataset
land NASA ORNL_CLOUD Level 4 COG
In plain English

What it measures. Estimates of how much moisture is in the top layer of soil (the upper 5 centimeters) across North America, at about 250-meter detail for each 16-day period from mid-2002 to the end of 2020.

How it's made. Created by a machine-learning model that sharpened coarse satellite soil-moisture data using clues like terrain, vegetation greenness, and land temperature; it is a derived, gridded product, not a direct reading.

How & where you'd use it. Supporting agriculture, drought monitoring, and water and ecosystem studies that need finer-scale soil moisture than coarse satellite data alone provides.

What's measured

LAND SURFACE › SOILS › SOIL MOISTURE/WATER CONTENTCLIMATE INDICATORS › LAND SURFACE/AGRICULTURE INDICATORS › SOIL MOISTURE

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2002-06-26 → 2020-12-31
  • Measured byCOMPUTERS (Computer)
  • Processing levelLevel 4
  • Spatial extent-180, 14.5312, -39.9955, 82.7193
  • FormatsCOG
  • StatusCOMPLETE

What you can do with it

  • Track deforestation, fire scars and land-cover change
  • Monitor crop and vegetation health (NDVI/EVI)
  • Map how built-up vs. green an area is over time
Official description

This NASMo-TiAM (North America Soil Moisture Dataset Derived from Time-Specific Adaptable Machine Learning Models) dataset holds gridded estimates of surface soil moisture (0-5 cm depth) at a spatial resolution of 250 meters over 16-day intervals from mid-2002 to December 2020 for North America. The model employed Random Forests to downscale coarse-resolution soil moisture estimates (0.25 deg) from the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative (ESA CCI) based on their correlation with a set of static (terrain parameters, bulk density) and dynamic covariates (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, land surface temperature). NASMo-TiAM 250m predictions were evaluated through cross-validation with ESA CCI reference data and independent ground-truth validation using North American Soil Moisture Database (NASMD) records. The data are provided in cloud optimized GeoTIFF format.

Get the data

nasmo_tiam_250m_2326_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="NASMo_TiAM_250m_2326",
    version="1",
    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 ORNL_CLOUD
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.