SMOS Soil Freeze and Thaw State: Daily Northern Hemisphere Soil Conditions

Daily information from 2010 onwards on soil freeze and thaw states in the Northern Hemisphere. The Finnish Meteorological Institute generates these Level 3 products from SMOS satellite brightness temperature observations. Data is provided in NetCDF format on a 25 km resolution EASE2-Grid.

Use Cases

• Modeling permafrost dynamics based on daily soil state information.
• Studying seasonal carbon cycle transitions based on freeze/thaw timing.
• Analyzing climate change impacts on northern ecosystems based on hemispheric-scale soil data.
• Validating land surface models based on satellite-derived soil condition observations.

Strengths

• Provides daily temporal resolution for tracking soil state changes.
• Covers the entire Northern Hemisphere, offering broad spatial coverage.
• Data is available from 2010, providing over a decade of continuous observations.
• Uses a standardized 25 km x 25 km Equal-Area Scalable Earth Grid (EASE2-Grid).

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to nasa_earthdata, focusing solely on the Northern Hemisphere.

Provenance

Source

European Space Agency (ESA) / Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI)

Collection Method

Processed from SMOS satellite Level 3 brightness temperatures provided by CATDS.

Time Range

2010 onwards

Freshness

Update frequency is unknown; daily products are generated from ongoing SMOS observations.

Geography

Northern Hemisphere