How wet the soil is, sharpened to 1 km (SMAP)
What it measures. Daily maps of how moist the top layer of soil is across the whole planet, at a fine 1-kilometer grid. Each pixel tells you how wet or dry the ground surface was that day.
How it's made. Built from the SMAP satellite's microwave radiometer, which senses soil moisture, then sharpened to 1 km by blending in MODIS land surface temperature data through a downscaling step.
How & where you'd use it. Useful for tracking drought, planning irrigation, forecasting floods, and studying how water moves between the land and the atmosphere. The fine detail makes it handy at the scale of farms and small watersheds.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2015-04-01 → 2024-06-29
- Measured bySMAP (SMAP L-BAND RADIOMETER)
- Processing levelLevel 3
- Spatial extent-180, -86, 180, 86
- FormatsGeoTIFF
- 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 data product contains global daily 1 km resolution surface soil moisture derived from the SMAP L-band radiometer. Specifically, MODIS land surface temperature data is used with the SMAP Enhanced L2radiometer Half-Orbit 9 km EASE-Grid Soil Moisture product in a downscaling algorithm to estimate soil moisture. The data set is validated by in situ soil moisture measurements from dense soil moisture networks representing different global land cover types.
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="NSIDC-0779",
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 NSIDC_CPRDBrowsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package. Official links
- Search and order NASA Earth Science data using spatial and temporal filters. Reformatting, reprojecting, and subsetting options are available for some data sets. GET DATA
- Quickly download a few files using a web browser, or access data through a command-line utility such as WGET. GET DATA
- Search data by spatial and/or temporal ranges or file name. Choose from various download options, including a Python script. GET DATA
- A Python library to search and access NASA Earth science data with just a few lines of code GET DATA
- Find more data access options and help resources. VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- SMAP-Derived 1-km Downscaled Surface Soil Moisture Product, Version 1 User Guide VIEW RELATED INFORMATION