SMAP L2 Radiometer Half-Orbit 36 km EASE-Grid Soil Moisture, Version 1
Data set id:
SPL2SMP
DOI: 10.5067/HF1KOE0Q85V7
There is a more recent version of these data.
Version Summary
Version Summary
First public data release
Overview
This Level-2 (L2) soil moisture product provides gridded estimates of global land surface conditions retrieved by the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) passive microwave radiometer during 6:00 a.m. descending and 6:00 p.m. ascending half-orbit passes. Input SMAP L-band brightness temperature data used to derive soil moisture are resampled to an Earth-fixed, global, cylindrical 36 km Equal-Area Scalable Earth Grid, Version 2.0 (EASE-Grid 2.0). A variety of ancillary data are also used as input, such as soil texture and vegetation opacity.
Note: These data are Beta-release quality, meaning that they have not undergone full validation and may still contain significant errors. Currently, in this Beta release, 6:00 p.m. ascending half-orbit granules are not considered by the SPL2SMP processing software; however, that inclusion is expected after further analysis. In addition, the data fields that indicate retrieval quality, called retrieval qual flag and retrieval qual flag option[1-5], were found to contain incorrect information. Users are advised to ignore these data fields in Version 1 of this product.
Parameter(s):
ALBEDO
BRIGHTNESS TEMPERATURE
SOIL MOISTURE/WATER CONTENT
SURFACE ROUGHNESS
VEGETATION WATER CONTENT
Platform(s):
SMAP Observatory
Sensor(s):
SMAP L-BAND RADIOMETER
Data Format(s):
HDF5
Temporal Coverage:
- 9 September 2015 to 25 October 2015
Temporal Resolution:
- 49 minute
Spatial Resolution:
- 36 km
- 36 km
Spatial Reference System(s):
Not Specified
Spatial Coverage:
- N:85.044S:-85.044E:180W:-180
Blue outlined yellow areas on the map below indicate the spatial coverage for this data set.
Data Access & Tools
This data set has been retired. There is a more recent version of these data.
Documentation
General Resources
Quality Assessment Reports
Product Specification Documents
Help Articles
General Questions & FAQs
SMAP data files contain rich quality information that can be useful for many data users. The retrieval quality flag and surface flag bit values and interpretations are documented in the respective product Data Fields pages of the user guides for these data products
SMAP Ancillary data sets are used to produce SMAP Level-1, -2, -3, and -4 standard data products.
The following table describes both the required and actual latencies for the different SMAP radiometer data sets. Latency is defined as the time (# days, hh:mm:ss) from data acquisition to product generation.
This short article describes the customization services available for SMAP data using Earthdata Search.
The NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC) is migrating its primary data access from its legacy, on-premises archive to the NASA Earthdata Cloud.
How to Articles
Many NSIDC DAAC data sets can be accessed using NSIDC DAAC's Data Access Tool. This tool provides the ability to search and filter data with spatial and temporal constraints using a map-based interface.Users have the option to:
To convert HDF5 files into binary format you will need to use the h5dump utility, which is part of the HDF5 distribution available from the HDF Group. How you install HDF5 depends on your operating system.
The following are instructions on how to import and geolocate SMAP Level-1C HDF5 data in ENVI.
Testing notes
Software: ENVI
Software version: 5.3 and above. If using version 5.3, service pack 5.3.1 is needed.
Platform: Windows 7
The NASA Earthdata Cloud is the NASA cloud-based archive of Earth observations. It is hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Learn how to find and access NSIDC DAAC data directly in the cloud.
All data from the NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC) is directly accessible through our HTTPS file system using Wget or curl. This article provides basic command line instructions for accessing data using this method.
This article highlights the NSIDC DAAC data sets available with customization options and outlines a workflow for searching, ordering, and customizing data in NASA Earthdata Search. This approach is ideal for users who want to download data to their local machine.
NASA Worldview is a map interface that allows users to interactively browse imagery, create visualizations, and download the underlying data.
NASA's Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS) provides up to date, full resolution imagery for selected NSIDC DAAC data sets.