NASA GCOM-W Project: Global Surface Soil Moisture from Satellite, 2012-Present

Global satellite-derived land surface parameters from the JAXA GCOM-W1 satellite, launched in May 2012. The data includes surface soil moisture, land surface temperature, and vegetation water content, retrieved using the Land Parameter Retrieval Model (LPRM) from AMSR2 passive microwave data. It is processed to a 10 km spatial resolution and is available as Level 2 swath and Level 3 gridded products.

Use Cases

• Modeling global hydrological cycles based on long-term surface soil moisture records.
• Monitoring agricultural drought and vegetation health based on vegetation water content and soil moisture.
• Assimilating satellite observations into weather and climate models based on land surface temperature and soil moisture fields.
• Studying the microwave radiative transfer of land surfaces based on the forward model methodology described.

Strengths

• Continuous temporal coverage from May 2012 to the present, providing over a decade of observations.
• Derives three key land parameters (soil moisture, skin temperature, vegetation water content) from a unified retrieval model.
• Applies a downscaling technique to achieve a 10 km by 10 km spatial resolution from original coarser sensor data.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale statistical analysis.
• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality and completeness require manual inspection.

Provenance

Source

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Global Change Observation Mission-1st Water (GCOM-W1) satellite.

Collection Method

Parameters derived from Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) brightness temperatures using the Land Parameter Retrieval Model (LPRM).

Time Range

May 2012 to present

Freshness

Data covers up to the present, but the last update date for the dataset listing is unknown.

Geography

Global