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Full catalog/SPL3SMAP
SPL3SMAP·v003·dataset

How wet the soil is, daily (SMAP, 9 km)

SMAP L3 Radar/Radiometer Global Daily 9 km EASE-Grid Soil Moisture V003
land NASA NSIDC_CPRD Level 3 HDF5
In plain English

What it measures. How wet the soil is across global land, as a daily snapshot at about 9 km detail.

How it's made. Retrieved by NASA's SMAP satellite using both its radar and microwave radiometer, then resampled onto an equal-area global grid.

How & where you'd use it. Tracking soil moisture for drought monitoring, agriculture, flood forecasting, and weather and climate models.

What's measured

SPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › MICROWAVE › BRIGHTNESS TEMPERATURESPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › RADAR › SIGMA NAUGHTLAND SURFACE › SOILS › SOIL MOISTURE/WATER CONTENT

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2015-04-13 → 2015-07-07
  • Measured bySMAP (SMAP L-BAND RADAR, SMAP L-BAND RADIOMETER)
  • Processing levelLevel 3
  • 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-3 (L3) soil moisture product provides a daily composite of global land surface conditions retrieved by both the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) radar and radiometer. SMAP L-band soil moisture data are resampled to an Earth-fixed, global, cylindrical 9 km Equal-Area Scalable Earth Grid, Version 2.0 (EASE-Grid 2.0).

Get the data

spl3smap_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="SPL3SMAP",
    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_CPRD
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.