Data · dataset · 2026
Description of the UCAR/CU soil moisture product
Listed in National Center for Atmospheric Research
Currently, the ability to use remotely sensed soil moisture to investigate linkages between the water and energy cycles and for use in data assimilation studies is limited to passive microwave data whose temporal revisit time is 2-3 days or active microwave products with a much longer (>10 days) revisit time.
Description
This paper describes a dataset that provides soil moisture retrievals, which are gridded to 36 km, for the upper 5 cm of the soil surface at sparsely sampled 6-hour intervals for +/- 38 degrees latitude for 2017-present.
Retrievals are derived from the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) constellation, which uses GNSS-Reflectometry to obtain L-band reflectivity observations over the Earth's surface. The product was developed by calibrating CYGNSS reflectivity observations to soil moisture retrievals from NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission. Retrievals were validated against observations from 171 in-situ soil moisture probes, with a median unbiased root-mean-square error (ubRMSE) of 0.049 cm(3) cm(-3) (standard deviation = 0.026 cm(3) cm(-3)) and median correlation coefficient of 0.4 (standard deviation = 0.27).
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For the same stations, the median ubRMSE between SMAP and in-situ observations was 0.045 cm(3) cm(-3) (standard deviation = 0.025 cm(3) cm(-3)) and median correlation coefficient was 0.69 (standard deviation = 0.27). The UCAR/CU Soil Moisture Product is thus complementary to SMAP, albeit with a larger random noise component, providing soil moisture retrievals for applications that require faster revisit times than passive microwave remote sensing currently provides.
Links
Get the data
- Publisher page n2t.org/ark:/85065/d75m68xk ↗
documentation · download · from data ucar edu
Where it is published
- data.ucar.edu /dataset/description-of-the-ucar-cu-soil-moisture-product ↗
National Center for Atmospheric Research dataset page
landing page · from data ucar edu
Catalogue records · 1
- CKAN API data.ucar.edu/api/3/action/package_show?id=bc18b82e-0b53-4997-ad23-3511624d0… ↗
metadata API · from data ucar edu
Topics
- From keywords
- Earth & Environmental Science · Ocean & Atmospheric Science
- Inferred from text
- Satellite remote sensing 65%
Provenance · 1 source records, 8 field assertions
| Source | Key | Last seen | Raw |
|---|---|---|---|
| National Center for Atmospheric Research | bc18b82e-0b53-4997-ad23-3511624d0ca6 | 12 d ago | JSON v1 |
| Field | Assertion | Extractor | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| concepts[field].local:field:earth-environmental | mapping · data ucar edu | connector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0 | |
| concepts[field].local:field:ocean-atmospheric | mapping · data ucar edu | connector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0 | |
| concepts[modality].local:modality:remote-sensing | enrichment · data ucar edu | keyword-concept-rules@1.0.0 | title+description (65%) |
| created_date | source · data ucar edu | connector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0 | |
| description | source · data ucar edu | connector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0 | /notes |
| publication_date | source · data ucar edu | connector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0 | |
| title | source · data ucar edu | connector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0 | /title |
| updated_date | source · data ucar edu | connector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0 |