How much water plants hold (SMAPVEX 2012) — SV12VWC

In plain English

What it measures. Daily maps of how much water plants were holding across a 2012 field campaign area, expressed as vegetation water content.

How it's made. Calculated by turning greenness readings (NDVI) from the SPOT and RapidEye satellites into water-content estimates and filling in each day's map by interpolation, checked against on-the-ground samples.

How & where you'd use it. Created to support the SMAP soil-moisture mission's 2012 validation experiment, helping researchers account for how vegetation affects soil-moisture measurements.

What's measured

BIOSPHERE › VEGETATION › PLANT CHARACTERISTICS › VEGETATION WATER CONTENT

Coverage & cadence

Time span2012-05-14 → 2012-07-19
Measured byRAPIDEYE (REIS) · SPOT-4 (HRVIR)
Processing levelLevel Not provided
Spatial extent-98.74, 49.31, -97.36, 50.17
FormatsGeoTIFF, ASCII
StatusCOMPLETE

What you can do with it

Map vegetation, forests and biomass
Monitor ecosystem productivity and carbon
Support habitat and biodiversity studies

Official description

The daily Vegetation Water Content (VWC) maps for the Soil Moisture Active Passive Validation Experiment 2012 (SMAPVEX12) were derived by calculating Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from SPOT and RapidEye satellite overpasses and then interpolating it for each day of the campaign. In addition, samples from a range of vegetation types were used to compare ground-based measurements to the satellite-based estimates.

Get the data

sv12vwc_access.py

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

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="SV12VWC",
    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.

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
SMAPVEX12 Vegetation Water Content Map, Version 1 User Guide VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
SMAPVEX12 Database Report VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
SMAPVEX12 Experiment Plan VIEW RELATED INFORMATION