How wet the soil is (SMAP, 9 km)
What it measures. Estimates how wet the top layer of soil is across the globe, mapped onto a 9 km grid.
How it's made. Produced by NASA's SMAP satellite, which combines its radar and microwave radiometer readings during early-morning passes to infer soil moisture.
How & where you'd use it. Supports drought monitoring, flood forecasting, crop management, and weather prediction, since soil wetness shapes how water and heat move between land and air.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2015-04-13 → 2015-07-07
- Measured bySMAP (SMAP L-BAND RADAR, SMAP L-BAND RADIOMETER)
- Processing levelLevel 2
- Spatial extent-180, -85.044, 180, 85.044
- FormatsHDF5
- 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 Level-2 (L2) soil moisture product provides estimates of global land surface conditions retrieved by both the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) radar and radiometer during 6:00 a.m. descending half-orbit passes. SMAP L-band backscatter and brightness temperatures are used to derive soil moisture data, which are then resampled to an Earth-fixed, global, cylindrical 9 km Equal-Area Scalable Earth Grid, Version 2.0 (EASE-Grid 2.0).
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="SPL2SMAP",
version="003",
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 L2 Radar/Radiometer Half-Orbit 9 km EASE-Grid Soil Moisture, Version 3 User Guide VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- SMAP Post-Recovery Advisory Note 23 July 2019 VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- SMAP Ancillary Data Report: Landcover Classification [2013] VIEW RELATED INFORMATION