3km SMAP/CYGNSS Soil Moisture

Soil moisture data with both fine spatial and fine temporal resolution has the potential to benefit many hydrologic and climatic applications. Unfortunately, satellite soil moisture data tends to have either fine spatial OR fine temporal resolution, but not both.

I downscaled Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) brightness temperatures to 3km using Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) reflectivity values, and then calculated soil moisture using the SMAP single-channel vertically-polarized (SCA-V) soil moisture algorithm. In simpler terms, I merged the data from two different NASA satellites and then used an existing soil moisture algorithm to create a new soil moisture dataset.

3km SMAP/CYGNSS soil moisture has a repeat period of ~2-3 days, making it the first publicly available satellite soil moisture dataset with both fine spatial and fine temporal resolution.