The NASA-USDA Global soil moisture data provides soil moisture information across the globe at 0.25°x0.25°spatial resolution. These data sets include: surface and subsurface soil moisture (mm), soil moisture profile (%), surface and subsurface soil moisture anomalies (-). The data set is generated by integrating satellite-derived Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) and Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity (SMOS) soil moisture observations into the modified two-layer Palmer model using Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) data assimilation approach. The assimilation of the satellite-derived soil moisture observations helped improve the model-based soil moisture predictions, particularly over poorly instrumented areas of the world that lack good quality precipitation data.

The Hydrological Science Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in cooperation with USDA Foreign Agricultural Services developed these datasets, which are operationally pushed to USDA-FAS, and displayed at the agency’s Crop Explorer web site. These data sets are also available on Google Earth Engine (GEE) data catalog, enables users to acquire, process, analyze and visualize soil moisture data rapidly for any user specified region without downloading and processing a large volume of data on the user’s desktop. 

GEE link for Soil moisture data sets:

SMAP

SMOS

HTTPS link:

SMAP

SMOS

Sample images:

Figure 1: SMOS and SMAP soil moisture data user’s stats in Google Earth Engine.