Skip to main content

Description

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.

Version Description

Changes to this version include: - Dual Channel Algorithm (DCA) replaces Single Channel Algorithm – Vertical (SCA-V) as baseline algorithm - Addition of two soil texture data elements, organic_content and sand_fraction. These represent the aggregated organic content and sand fraction within the 36 km grid cell, respectively. - Bulk_density maximum value changed from 1.0 to 2.65.

Product Summary

Platforms
SMAP
Instruments
SMAP L-BAND RADIOMETER
Spatial Extent

N: 85.044 S: -85.044 E: 180 W: -180

Spatial Resolution
36 Kilometers x 36 Kilometers
Spatial Reference System(s)
WGS 84 / NSIDC EASE-Grid 2.0 Global (EPSG:6933)
Location
GLOBAL LAND
Coordinate System
CARTESIAN
Granule Spatial Representation
GEODETIC
Temporal Extent
2015-03-31 to 2023-12-04
Temporal Resolution
49 Minute
Concept ID
C2830469442-NSIDC_CPRD
Data State
DEPRECATED
Number of Files/Granules
0
Processing Level
2
Published
Science Keywords
Brightness Temperature ,
Surface Soil Moisture

Citation

Citation is critically important for dataset documentation and discovery. This dataset is openly shared, without restriction, in accordance with the EOSDIS Data Use and Citation Guidance.

Copy Citation

ONeill, P., Chan, S., Njoku, E., Jackson, T., Bindlish, R., & Chaubell, J. (2021). SMAP L2 Radiometer Half-Orbit 36 km EASE-Grid Soil Moisture, Version 8 [Data set]. NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center. https://doi.org/10.5067/LPJ8F0TAK6E0 Date Accessed: 2026-05-27

Documents