Bechtold, M., R. H. Reichle, Q. Liu, J. V. Ardizzone, W. Crow, J. Kimball, R. D. Koster, S. Apers, A. Felsberg, J. Mortelmans, B. Valkenborg, and G. J. M. De Lannoy:
"An Operational Product for Peatland Applications: The Version 7 of the SMAP Level-4 Soil Moisture Data Assimilation Product"
Presentation at the AGU Fall Meeting, Chicago, IL, USA, 2022.

Abstract:
The NASA Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission Level-4 Soil Moisture (L4_SM) product provides global, 9-km resolution, 3-hourly surface (0-5 cm) and root-zone (0-100 cm) soil moisture estimates from April 2015 to present with a mean latency of 2.5 days from the time of observation. The L4_SM estimates are derived from the assimilation of SMAP L-band (1.4 GHz) brightness temperature (Tb) observations into the NASA Catchment Land Surface Model (CLSM).

The recently released Version 7 of the L4_SM product comprises a key advancement that is of interest for peatland applications. CLSM now includes the recently developed PEATCLSM hydrology module for peatlands and uses an updated global peatland distribution. In this presentation, we first give an overview of the operational product for the peatland community. We further show how the incorporation of PEATCLSM considerably improves the dynamics of water table depth, surface soil moisture and evapotranspiration in L4_SM Version 7 over Version 6 when evaluated against in situ measurements in peatlands. These improvements are also manifested in smaller Tb observation-minus-forecast residuals. Eventually, we provide three research examples in which the data assimilation product is used to gain insights into: peatland hydrological processes, the peat moisture dependency of the carbon cycle, and wildfire occurrence in peatlands.

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NASA-GSFC / GMAO / Rolf Reichle