Earth Data School
About
Full catalog/SV12PLTB
SV12PLTB·v1·dataset

Microwave brightness over farmland for soil moisture tests

SMAPVEX12 PALS Brightness Temperature Data V001
land NASA NSIDC_CPRD Level Not provided ASCII
In plain English

What it measures. How bright farmland looked to a microwave sensor (brightness temperature), the raw signal that reflects how wet the soil is.

How it's made. Collected by the PALS instrument flown on an aircraft during the 2012 SMAPVEX soil-moisture field experiment.

How & where you'd use it. A test-and-validation input used by scientists to check and improve satellite estimates of soil moisture, rather than a finished product for general use.

What's measured

SPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › MICROWAVE › BRIGHTNESS TEMPERATURELAND SURFACE › SURFACE THERMAL PROPERTIES › LAND SURFACE TEMPERATURE

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2012-06-07 → 2012-07-19
  • Measured byAIRCRAFT (PALS)
  • Processing levelLevel Not provided
  • Spatial extent-98.51, 49.44, -97.85, 49.96
  • FormatsASCII
  • 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 set contains brightness temperatures obtained by the Passive Active L-band System (PALS) aircraft instrument. The data were collected as part of SMAPVEX12, the Soil Moisture Active Passive Validation Experiment 2012.

Get the data

sv12pltb_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="SV12PLTB",
    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_CPRD
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.