GMAO Contributes to the SMAP Project: Level-4 products released

November 2, 2015

The NASA Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) is pleased to announce the availability of Level-4 datasets from the NASA Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission. The new datasets include the SMAP Surface and Root Zone Soil Moisture (L4_SM) and the Net Ecosystem Carbon Exchange (L4_C) products developed and generated by GMAO in collaboration with The University of Montana and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The Level-4 datasets provide value-added data products that rely on the merger of SMAP observations into physically-based numerical models of the land surface water, energy, and carbon cycles. The Level-4 datasets therefore propagate information from the SMAP measurements into geophysical fields of interest that are not directly observed by the SMAP instruments.

Available L4_SM data include global, 9-km, 3-hourly estimates of surface and root zone soil moisture, surface and soil temperature, and land surface fluxes, along with algorithm diagnostics from the ensemble-based data assimilation system. L4_C data include global, 9-km, daily estimates of net ecosystem carbon exchange, component carbon stocks and fluxes, and sub-grid information broken down by plant functional types.

Beta-release versions of the Level-4 datasets are available from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

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