• On Wednesday, March 20, from 9:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. (US Mountain Time), the following data collections may not be available due to planned system maintenance: ASO, AMSR Unified, AMSR-E, Aquarius, High Mountain Asia, IceBridge, ICESat/GLAS, ICESat-2, LVIS, MEaSUREs, MODIS, Nimbus, SMAP, SnowEx, SSM/I-SSMIS and VIIRS.

  • Data is currently available for this data set from 04 Dec 2023 onward. Data since 31 March 2015 will become available as they are reprocessed.

SMAP L2 Radiometer Half-Orbit 36 km EASE-Grid Soil Moisture, Version 9
Data set id:
SPL2SMP
DOI: 10.5067/K7Y2D8QQVZ4L
This is the most recent version of these data.
Version Summary
Changes to this version include:
• An improved processing methodology was applied to the input Level-1C radiometer brightness temperatures.
• The data algorithms, structure, content, or processor code are otherwise unchanged from the previous version.

For the full major and minor version history, go to https://nsidc.org/data/smap/version-history

Overview

This Level-2 (L2) soil moisture product provides 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. SMAP L-band brightness temperatures are resampled to an Earth-fixed, global, cylindrical 36 km Equal-Area Scalable Earth Grid, Version 2.0 (EASE-Grid 2.0) [and made available as the SPL1CTB product], and the gridded brightness temperatures are then used to derive gridded soil moisture data.
Parameter(s):
BRIGHTNESS TEMPERATURESURFACE SOIL MOISTURE
Platform(s):
SMAP
Sensor(s):
SMAP L-BAND RADIOMETER
Data Format(s):
HDF5
Temporal Coverage:
31 March 2015 to present
Temporal Resolution:
  • 49 minute
Spatial Resolution:
  • 36 km
  • 36 km
Spatial Reference System(s):
WGS 84 / NSIDC EASE-Grid 2.0 Global
EPSG:6933
Spatial Coverage:
N:
85.044
S:
-85.044
E:
180
W:
-180
Blue outlined yellow areas on the map below indicate the spatial coverage for this data set.

Data Access & Tools

A free NASA Earthdata Login account is required to access these data. Learn More

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.

How to Articles

Many NSIDC DAAC data sets can be accessed using the 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
Data subscriptions are available for select NSIDC DAAC data collections. Once signed up, the subscription service automatically sends you new data as they are delivered from active NASA satellite missions.
All data from the NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC) can be accessed directly from our HTTPS file system, using wget or curl. Basic command line instructions are provided in the article below. 
NASA Earthdata Search is a map-based interface where a user can search for Earth science data, filter results based on spatial and temporal constraints, and order data with customizations including re-formatting, re-projecting, and spatial and parameter subsetting.
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.